Please release me, let me go. (Richmond)

[David Milne]

Hi,

In response to Richmond's post

-Just to be awkward (for a change . . . no irony intended), if 6.7.4 is
--built so that it will run
on Windows XP [ a system released in 2001 ] why is it not built so that
-it can run on
-Mac OS 10.4 PPC [ a system released in 2005 ], or, for that matter, Mac
-OS 10.4 Intel?

-It is, also, interesting to note that the first alpha build of LC 8 is
-also capable of running on Windows XP.

-The reply will, inevitably, consist of stuff about market share . . .
-which is probably due to a bad
-case of not thinking one's way through a load of statistics.

-The rationale behind dropping support for an out-dated operating system,
-surely, should not
-be based on the global installed base of that operating system, but the
-globally installed base
-of that operating system who use LiveCode for software development, and
-the clients to whom
-they sell/give their standalones for deployment.

I think that you are being unfair to the LiveCode team.
Windoze has many failings but one advantage it has over Apple, and it is an
advantage of great merit. Windoze seeks to be backward compatible.

Windows 95 applications will usually run just fine. Even windows 3
applications will run. Sometimes you will be prompted to download a
discontinued windows library module, which is not difficult.

If you had a favourite program on the windows platform from twenty years
ago, you can usually continue to use the original files.

I got into similar discussion about this recently when I answered someone's
comment that "Zillions of Game" ( which plays about 2000 subscriber donated
board game scripts) was dead because it had not been updated for over ten
years. I explained that it runs just fine on windows 8. On their website
you can still see new game scripts uploaded each week. I explained that
Windoze was backward compatible. One of its few merits.

I am not an Apple fanboy. I hate the rotating rainbow beachball of death on
my mac mini with an intensity equal to my hate for the rotating annulus
horribilis on my windoze pcs. I have a mac mini, iPad 2 and iPad 2 Air, and
two windoze pcs and a Raspberry Pi as well as a cheap nondescript android
tablet.

I expect that you will find that an old version 2 of Revolution will run on
windows 8.

So please do not blame Runvrev.  Windoze made a commitment to backward
compatibility and Apple did not. Apple thought that it was too much of a
bother.

Give Windoze credit for one of the few things that it got right!

Regards and raspberries :-)