Software
Developers consider requiring Snow Leopard for apps
By Jim DalrympleJune 10, 2009, 2:53 pm PT
Developers are very confident at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). So confident, in fact, some are considering a change in system requirements in the next major version of their applications.
With all of its enhancements, Snow Leopard promises to be one of the best Mac OS X releases ever. However, those enhancements have some developers wondering what to do. In order to fully take advantage of Mac OS X’s new technologies and faster performance, some developers at the conference are considering only supporting Snow Leopard.
“We’re taking a hard look at requiring the next version of our apps to require Snow Leopard,” Ken Case, president of The Omni Group, told The Loop.
Case explained that in order for his applications to take advantage of the new technologies like OpenCL, they will have to rewrite the code. Once that’s done, the apps will no longer run in Leopard.
Other developers I spoke with at the conference echoed Case’s feelings. No decision has been made at this point by any of the developers.
It’s an interesting place that developers find themselves in. On one hand, they want to put out the best applications they can, but at the same time they are held back by supporting older operating systems.
Of course, nobody wants to leave customers–or potential customers–behind, but this wouldn’t be the first time developers have made this leap of faith.
When Mac OS X Leopard was released, some developers required it as a minimum in order to use their apps. There was very little negative feedback from the community, but of course there is no way to know if the app would have been more successful had they allowed earlier operating systems to run the app.
With Apple’s aggressive upgrade pricing for Snow Leopard, upgrading to the new system will be a given for most users.
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Developers consider requiring Snow Leopard for apps
By Jim DalrympleJune 10, 2009, 2:53 pm PT
Developers are very confident at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). So confident, in fact, some are considering a change in system requirements in the next major version of their applications.
With all of its enhancements, Snow Leopard promises to be one of the best Mac OS X releases ever. However, those enhancements have some developers wondering what to do. In order to fully take advantage of Mac OS X’s new technologies and faster performance, some developers at the conference are considering only supporting Snow Leopard.
“We’re taking a hard look at requiring the next version of our apps to require Snow Leopard,” Ken Case, president of The Omni Group, told The Loop.
Case explained that in order for his applications to take advantage of the new technologies like OpenCL, they will have to rewrite the code. Once that’s done, the apps will no longer run in Leopard.
Other developers I spoke with at the conference echoed Case’s feelings. No decision has been made at this point by any of the developers.
It’s an interesting place that developers find themselves in. On one hand, they want to put out the best applications they can, but at the same time they are held back by supporting older operating systems.
Of course, nobody wants to leave customers–or potential customers–behind, but this wouldn’t be the first time developers have made this leap of faith.
When Mac OS X Leopard was released, some developers required it as a minimum in order to use their apps. There was very little negative feedback from the community, but of course there is no way to know if the app would have been more successful had they allowed earlier operating systems to run the app.
With Apple’s aggressive upgrade pricing for Snow Leopard, upgrading to the new system will be a given for most users.
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3 Responses to “Developers consider requiring Snow Leopard for apps”
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The big difference is that if they are abandoning Leopard, they are also abandoning PowerPC altogether.
I don’t even want to hear how many G5 and G4 owners are going to be crying in the forums for years and years about this.
“Apple abandoned my G3 iMac SE!”
Of course, this issue also has bogged down Microsoft for years and years, and they’re still hurting from an unwillingness to push the envelope.
It’s not as much about legacy issues as it is their bottom line. (Although the removal of legacy bloat is a wonderful added bonus)
They aren’t going to bend over backwards to support old hardware when they aren’t receiving decent monetary compensation for their efforts. They are in business to sell you Macs, iPhones, and iPod Touches, not OS X. If you aren’t buying hardware but every 5-7 years …don’t expect to be much of an influence on their decision making process.
It seems a bit premature, but the price of progress is becoming obsolete.
OpenCL only applies to a few of the most recent GPU’s. They appear on Mac’s which have been sold in the last iteration.
I purchased my iMac in August of last year, so it has the ATI Radeon HD2600 GPU which will not utilize OpenCL. It will likely be another two year until I can persuade myself to buy a new computer, since this 24 inch iMac is working fine.
At least, I will be able to utilize 64 bit processing. Almost all applications on the Mac will migrate to 64 bit in 2010.
This is possible only because of the move to Intel Hardware three years ago which forced developers to use the XCode IDE.
If the developers migrated to Cocoa on XCode they will be able to recompile to 64 bit in a Fat release which will be transparent t the users. Both 32 and 64 bit codes (Intel and PowerPC) can be on one DVD.
Why should I bemoan what I am missing? By the time I am ready to buy a new computer, most of the bugs will have been worked out of the hardware and software.