Filed under: Software
Why Path Finder 4 is Tiger only
We've mentioned Path Finder, the full featured Finder alternative from Cocoatech, a number of times here on TUAW. I am sure there are a few of you that were upset because the latest version of Path Finder only works with OS X 10.4. The MacDevCenter sat down with Steve Gehrman and Neil Lee, the men behind the app, to talk about the decision to only support Tiger with Pathfinder 4.They both make compelling arguments for Tiger only support (mostly they wanted to include the latest and greatest Cocoa features, and since there is only one guy coding it didn't seem sensible to support two different versions of Path Fider, a Tiger specific version and a pre-Tiger version). Well worth a read, if you are interested in Mac development.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
sjmills said 10:47PM on 6-05-2006
His reasons are pretty much bull. Yes, every developer would like to instantly drop support for older OSs every time a new one comes out. That would make life easy. The problem with dropping old OSs—and it's obvious—is that you lose customers. As the lead developer for an app with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and that still has customers using OS9, I'd love to drop support for everything but 10.4. But that ain't gonna happen. And you know what? It really is NOT that hard to write code that uses new APIs when the OS it's running can use them, and to use the old APIs when it's not. It's Basic Programming 101 knowledge.
I applaud the guy for having the balls to drop the old OSs, but I pity his customers.
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Neil said 11:23PM on 6-05-2006
In the end, it's our customers that drive these kinds of decisions. Every time a new major release of OS X comes out the Finder has access to new features - features that our customers want. It's all part of doing business when you're as small as we are, and your #1 competitor is Apple and the Finder.
If our customers overwhelmingly didn't want us to drop support obviously we would have to listen, but we've done three major transitions so far (10.2, 10.3, and 10.4) and I can count on two hands the number of complaints I received or read online from customers.
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