List of Leopard-only apps is growing

I thought the Objective-C garbage collection would naturally be backported to support older OS X versions, too. Why not?

This makes my work on a Lua - Foundation binding all the more interesting; it offers garbage collection and all the natural Lua benefits, and runs on existing (old) Objective-C runtime. Maybe Apple should just ditch the language itself (for end applications)? :)

Objective-C code lives in a dynamic runtime. The dynamic runtime is where many of the new features "wow. less gruntwork" reside. It's not the API so much as it is ... well ... the whole shebang. so-to-speak. No. A binary compiled for and linking against obj-c 2.0 will not run on tiger. Sorry. Dr. Craschenburn will visit if you try.

Sorry, but this actually means that the developers are a bit lazy. As a developer myself (not a great one, but hey…) I can tell you that it's really important to transit people. Why do you think Apple makes sure that Universal applications can also run on Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther, as in: not only Tiger)?

IMHO, evolution is a good thing, but there are limits. The least these devs could do is keeping available the older version(s) of their applications. Not for possible new customers, but for old customers that already trusted the devs with their money.

@Kevin
As long as you are not using any Leopard-only APIs, I don't think Obj-C 2.0 will have any problem running on older versions of Mac OS X. The compiler may not be backward compatible older Obj-C, but the compiled executable should run the same.

They aren't really locking out users of their software. Presumably the earlier versions will still be offered to people who don't want to upgrade to Leopard. It's mainly for the new features, which makes sense if the new features depend on newer technology to work.

So the message is more like: if you want the latest features, upgrade to the latest OS. If you don't, stick with last year's version and OS.

>8. It also means a loss of all of the classic
>applications - there are some older games which
>I would like to keep.

Not at all, this says nothing about Leopard's ability to run older apps, only that many new apps won't run on older OS versions. Those are two completely different things.

@Jonathan D Schor:

One thing to mention is that Classic is not dead yet. If you are on a PPC system, Classic is still alive and kicking, but OS 9 isn't included with the OS, and hasn't for a couple years. Newer PPC systems that can't boot OS 9 come with an OS 9 installer that should still be capable for 10.5 as well.

I can only guess that this change will be down to CoreAnimation. Really dont see what other changes would make that much difference... or at least a big enough difference to consider locking out alot of mac users from your software.

Jamie

It takes some balls to lock out millions of potential users like that. But I guess this happens every couple of years.

This only heightens the concern of how many Macs may be obsoleted by Leopard, such as my wifes G3 iBook.