Support for Mac OSX 10.5

Tue Feb 25 12:02:17 EST 2014

A little historical perspective:

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released in April 2005, nearly 9 years ago. RunRev only recently announced it is dropping support for Tiger. (In v. 6.6?) 

The transition to Intel processors happened in 2006, 8 years ago. 

OS X 10.5 was released in October 2007, 6.5 years ago. 

Dropping support for 10.5 won't affect me much, if at all, but I do worry about the many primary and secondary schools, public and private, who still depend on old hardware. (Richmond, this is your cue.) :)

My recommendation would be for RunRev to commit to maintaining LC 6.6 for at least another year, and even after that keeping it available for download for PPC/10.5 users.

So I agree with the prevailing sentiment to drop 10.5 support so we can move forward with newer technologies, with this caveat.

My .02.

Devin

On Feb 25, 2014, at 9:18 AM, Benjamin Beaumont <ben at runrev.com>
 wrote:

> Dear List Members,
> 
> As many of you will know, we have been overhauling the LiveCode engine for
> the last 12 months or so. For those of you who are watching the LiveCode
> Github repository, you'll notice that:
> 
> - LiveCode 7 (Unicode) is nearing a workable engine.
> - LiveCode 6.7 (Cocoa) is nearing a workable engine.
> 
> As we approach a DP we have a decision to make in regards to our continuing
> support for older platforms, in particular, Mac OSX 10.5. LiveCode 6.7
> requires considerable additional development resource to enable us to
> continue supporting Mac OSX 10.5. The cocoa port is all but complete for
> MacOS 10.6 and above. Our current plan is to put out a DP of LiveCode 6.7
> as soon on the final elements are running and then return to round out Mac
> OSX 10.5 support in subsequent DPs. LiveCode 7.0 has also required us to
> spend considerable amounts of time ensuring compatibility with 10.5 and has
> complicated our build process. As the 7.0 project matures, we'll have to
> continue investing development resource to ensure that Mac OSX 10.5 is
> fully support, above and beyond the resources used to support 10.6 and
> above.
> 
> So we'd like to consult the community to gauge whether now is the
> appropriate time to cease our support for Mac OS X 10.5. It would mean that
> LiveCode 6.6 would be the final Mac OSX 10.5 compatible version. We're keen
> to get the right balance between investing our development resources in
> progress and platform support.
> 
> Are there compelling reasons to support MacOS X 10.5 in LiveCode 6.7 and
> above? If so, we'd love to hear them.
> 
> Also, if we don't drop support at this point, when would it be appropriate
> for us to do so?
> 
> Below is our list of concerns and also reasons we feel it benefits our team
> and the community to drop support at this time.
> 
> Concerns
> MacOS 10.5 is the final version to support PowerPC. As a result, owners of
> PowerPC based Macs would not be able to use LiveCode 6.7 or above. However,
> only 3.8% of Mac desktop computers are running MacOS X 10.5 according to
> netmarketshare.com:
> 
> http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Mac+OS+X+10.5&qpcustomb=0
> 
> Users of LiveCode would be able to continue supporting their PowerPC
> customers by building with LiveCode 6.6, but as a result would have to
> start shipping two mac installers.
> 
> Pros
> Dropping support has the following advantages for the LiveCode team and the
> community:
> 
>   1. We spend less time back porting the 10.6 cocoa implementation to
>   support 10.5 (10.5's Cocoa APIs are less mature than 10.6's and it isn't
>   possible to completely eliminate Carbon usage for a 10.5 port). We estimate
>   it will take 3-4 weeks to get the core engine working on 10.5. This saving
>   also applies to all future projects.
>   2. We spend less time getting new developments to build and run under
>   10.5. For example, the new libraries to support unicode took a considerable
>   investment of engineering resource to compile for 10.5.
>   3. We can use newer compilers on Mac that have improved optimisation
>   features, the result being a faster LiveCode engine.
>   4. Implementing desktop features for Mac becomes simpler (and as a
>   result quicker) with the API's being relatively consistent from 10.6-10.9.
>   This enables us to deliver features faster. The remainder of the stretch
>   goals for the kickstarter project are 'feature' implementations. Supporting
>   10.5 requires us to implement the features for more than one API, in many
>   cases doubling the amount of work we have to do.
>   5. Building and feature additions become easier for open-source
>   contributors.
> 
> Thanks for reading up to this point. We appreciate your feedback as it will
> help us in our decision making process.
> 
> Warm regards,
> 
> Ben
> 
> _____________________________________________
> 
> Benjamin Beaumont . RunRev Ltd
> 
> LiveCode Product Manager
> mail : 25a Thistle Street Lane South West, Edinburgh, EH2 1EW
> email : ben at runrev.com
> company : +44(0) 845 219 89 23
> fax : +44(0) 845 458 8487
> web : www.runrev.com
> 
> LiveCode - Programming made simple
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Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University