Support for Mac OSX 10.5

Benjamin Beaumont ben at runrev.com
Tue Feb 25 11:18:38 EST 2014


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



More information about the use-livecode mailing list