Support for Mac OSX 10.5

Tue Feb 25 12:08:04 EST 2014

Ben,

Dozens of my customers are still using Mac OS X 10.4. I'm quite 
surprised that you are asking about 10.5. Perhaps you shouldn't ask this 
list but some neutral source to find out how many people are really 
using older systems.

Keep in mind that for people who focus on the Mac market, no longer 
supporting OSX 10.5 might make them move on to another development 
platform or put them out of business.

Also, I was at a university some time ago, where they had a classroom 
full with eMacs running OS X 10.3. I had to use an old version of 
Revolution and make changes to my scripts for them. No longer supporting 
OSX 10.5 will definitely be a blow in the face for the educational market!

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Use Color Converter to convert CMYK, RGB, RAL, XYZ, H.Lab and other 
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On 2/25/2014 17:18, Benjamin Beaumont 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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