Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Software, Blogs
List of Leopard-only apps is growing
Cocoa Blogs has linked a blog post from Gus Mueller, developer of such apps as VoodooPad, that an upcoming FlySketch 2.0 update will be Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard-only. This adds to a growing list of upcoming app releases such as TextMate 2 and Delicious Library 2 which will only play with Apple's next big cat.So what does this tell us about 10.5 and its impact on the Mac, both for developers and users? Sounds to me like there are some pretty ground-breaking changes in Leopard since, from what I understand, developers typically try to keep theirs doors as open as possible by maintaining backwards compatibility with at least one previous version of the Mac OS. Of course, this can vary depending on how difficult it is to keep these doors open, as well as whether the developer works out of an office or a living room.
Personally, this boosts my excitement for Leopard. If it changes things as much as developers keep hinting, 10.5 sounds like it'll be a fun ride.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Leonard Nimrod said 1:34PM on 1-02-2007
What are they using in Leopard that they can't make it work in Tiger? CoreVideo? CoreAnimation?
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Stefan said 1:57PM on 1-02-2007
Maybe they are using some of the new APIs that come with Leopard, maybe they just want to speed up development by using Obejctive-C 2.0's Garbage Collection so they don't have to care about memory management anymore.
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d said 2:01PM on 1-02-2007
works for me because I don't use any of those apps.
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Joe Cabrera said 9:21PM on 1-02-2007
Changes as in breaking older stuff, or changes as in really cool new technologies that we really want to take advantage of?
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Thomas said 2:27PM on 1-02-2007
I think it shows how cutting edge many Mac users are that developers can even consider doing this.
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Kevin said 2:25PM on 1-02-2007
Stefan is right. They are most likely using the garbage collection in Objective-C 2.0 and the new properties, along with CoreAnimation. The Objective-C 2.0 changes are not backwards compatible, so they're essentially useless if you want backwards compatibility.
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Ernest Leitch said 3:33PM on 1-02-2007
There is still a java bug in 10.4.8 that has existed since 10.3.x. I've submitted this bug to apple and they have tagged it as a serious bug but have not fixed it as of the most recent developers build. I'd love to by leopard, but I don't want to buy the same bug over again.
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Jonathan D. Schor said 4:24PM on 1-02-2007
It also means a loss of all of the classic applications - there are some older games which I would like to keep.
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Will said 7:08PM on 1-02-2007
This only heightens the concern of how many Macs may be obsoleted by Leopard, such as my wifes G3 iBook.
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Chris L said 5:45PM on 1-02-2007
It takes some balls to lock out millions of potential users like that. But I guess this happens every couple of years.
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Jamie said 6:01PM on 1-02-2007
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
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Kolenka said 11:07PM on 1-02-2007
@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.
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Simon Hibbs said 7:05PM on 1-02-2007
>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.
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Reg said 7:21PM on 1-02-2007
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.
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Brad said 7:23PM on 1-02-2007
@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.
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TriangleJuice said 4:31AM on 1-03-2007
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.
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Jonathan said 4:52AM on 1-03-2007
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.
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Asko Kauppi said 4:27PM on 1-06-2007
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)? :)
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