Support for Mac OSX 10.5

[Monte Goulding]

Hi Folks

Market share is one thing and sales to that market share is another. People still on 10.5 and below are quite used to not being able to buy new software by now so probably aren't even looking. So really this is just a maintenance market (which even Apple with their huge resources don't cover) and LC 6.5 and 6.6 will cover that for as long as it's required. Just like on iOS Apple make it incredibly difficult to build against old SDKs and maintain backwards compatibility so I would much rather that LC were ready when Apple drops Carbon than have new releases of OS X break LiveCode. 

I would add my vote for a Linux PPC version which shouldn't be all that complicated to do. Really the only hope for most of these machines to extend their functional life is to install one of the Linux PPC distros. It's also possible for anyone to maintain a fork of LC Community for as long as they like merging in applicable bug fixes.

Additionally from a contributor's perspective the whole 10.5/10.4 thing is quite frustrating because it means you need to jump through quite a few hoops to build on a modern OS X system. From comments on the engine forum I think at least one potential contributor simply gave up because of the hassle.

Spending a significant chunk of the kickstarter $ on maintaining compatibility with such a small percentage of machines really makes no sense whatsoever. I just wish this question was asked before the time was spent trying to get it working in LC 7 but then again it always takes some time for you to get to the point where you realise something will take a ridiculous amount of resources compared to the gain.

Cheers

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M E R Goulding 
Software development services
Bespoke application development for vertical markets

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