Catalina

[Paul Dupuis]

Customer (at least ours) do not understand 32 bit vs 64-bit. They will 
only know that (a) Apple says there is a new update for their computer 
and they click to update; or (b) as a member of some university or 
business, their computer is upgraded (perhaps at their request, perhaps 
as part of a planned upgrade cycle).

In either case, after they or some IT person has helped with the OS 
update, suddenly some of their software (including ours) no longer works 
(being 32-bit). They don't know why. They don't care why.

Now as for the "Well, Apple has been notifying you forever that, as a 
developer, you needed to be at 64 bits" or "But if you make your apps in 
LiveCode, just recompile with LiveCode 9"

Our apps have hundreds of thousands of line of code. In migrating them 
to LiveCode 9, at first they would not even run. In the course of 
migrating, Researchware staff has filed some 40 Livecode 9 bugs, some of 
which have no or no good workarounds, that directly impact features of 
our apps. Thankfully, most have work-arounds, but work-arounds and 
testing take time. Now for the record, LiveCode, Ltd. has been 
absolutely great in suggesting work-arounds or helping us work through 
the most serious of the bugs.

Our customers do not need 64 bits. Our very niche software does what it 
needs to do in 32 bits. Our customer have no disk space issues or memory 
issues due to both 32 and 64 bits libraries or support. Our customers 
would all be very happy to just keep using our tools as is. Hence, my 
venting is about Apple's intentionally planned obsolescence. What our 
customers want in new versions is not 64 bit, but functional 
enhancements to what our software does.

Being a small (very small), we have sunk a year of development in to 
getting to LC9 for 64 bit and making sure what we have in our app just 
works (QA testing!). We have had no resources to work on new or enhanced 
features. So our customers get an upgrade, with almost nothing new 
except 64 bit support, which also means with nothing new, we can't in 
good conscious charge an upgrade fee for it. Which means lost revenue, 
which badly hurts our small business.

Should we have migrated to LC9 sooner? Probably, but doing so would have 
meant - as it does now - only doing the migration and not new 
features/revenue. Also doing in now, we still found 40 bugs. If we did 
it a year or two ago, how many more bugs would we have found that have 
since been fixed!

That's what Catalina represents to us. I realize that many many Apple 
customers will be delighted with Catalina and I am happy for them. I 
just wish that Apple cared a bit more about not breaking what came 
before. Say what you will about Microsoft, but I still have specialty 
applications written for Windows 2000/XP that run fine under Windows 10! 
Microsoft is guilty of many many sins, but **for the most part** they 
try to keep things that once once worked still working.