Monday 1 October 2012

The beautiful snow leopard


[post originally written after the release of Lion and copied from a different blog system]

Isn't she gorgeous? I'm now appreciating that the operating system she represents is beautiful too.

I've found plenty of things about Lion [edit: and now Mountain Lion] that I really don't like.

I found a secondhand machine for day-to-day use and now that I'm back on Snow Leopard I love it.

Something else has made me think about users of older systems too. A user of my new product Scrutiny asked about ppc support. The answer is that I have been forced to move to XCode 4 in order to find and fix Lion problems. However, XCode 4 doesn't allow me to build a version which runs on ppc machines. Therefore I released the beta as intel / 10.5 upwards.

It seems that maybe I can use XCode 4 to build for ppc and all of these things have made me think that it would be a good thing to support older macs and versions of OSX.

Rather than try the XCode 4 conversion (I've found messing with build settings to be hair-tearingly frustrating) I may instead rebuild the products using XCode 3 and work in that.
Either way, I'm aiming to support Integrity and Scrutiny on ppc and intel, 10.4 and above if possible, or 10.5 and above if not.

[update: I'm now able to build my apps as a single version to run on 10.4 updwards and code-sign them for 10.8's Gatekeeper too.]

2 comments:

  1. That certainly is refreshing news.

    I have a legacy collection of Macs.

    My Power Macs are Performa 6360 and QuickSilver G4.

    Lately I have gone back in time and refurbished both power macs and re-installed the Mac OS. For example, the QuickSilver G4 has two internal drives operating Tiger and Lion plus FireWire drive running the pure OS 9 ( no classic here ! ).

    The Performa 6360 has a massive sized 1.5 GB internal Hard Drive running OS 8.5 and 9.1.

    Hope this post/comments will be published.

    Walter

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  2. Hi Walter, it's good to hear about your collection, I"m very fond of OS9, my first colour-screen mac was 9 (previously a powerbook with grey screen running 7). It's funny how things move on and things that seemed massive or powerful not so long ago seem small now.

    I first wrote this post a long time ago (2012 was when I copied the post from an older system onto Blogger). Since then things have moved on, I'm finding it very difficult to support 10.4 now without maintaining two separate versions. In some cases I'm able to support 10.5 but with the most recent developer tools it's very difficult to support anything before 10.6.

    What I plan to do is to find the most recent version of all of my apps which will work on 10.4 and make those available.

    I use a 10.6 machine for most of my day-to-day stuff and still think it's the height of Apple's powers.

    ReplyDelete