HyperCard Mailing List

Hi Uli,

Very encouraged to see you're still working on Stacksmith. Like
Haroldo, I've discovered it now requires OSX 10.11, and due to
using other old software that is "mission critical" to me, I am
still on older OS's.

I have noticed that quite a lot of new software I am interested
in only runs on the latest OSX. Since through this mailing list,
I have the "ear" of a real honest-to-god developer, I'm curious
to know what features (bugs?) the new operating systems gives
developers that prevents better backward compatibility?

Thanks,

Tim Selander
Tokyo, Japan

On 2016/05/08, 8:20, Haroldo Mauro hmauro@[redacted].com[HyperCard]
wrote:
> This is exciting. I downloaded it but it doesn't run on Lion (I'm still using 10.7.5) Is there an older version available to download?
>
>
> On 07/05/2016, at 19:40, Uli Kusterer Witness.of.TeachText@[redacted].net[HyperCard] wrote:
>
>> On 07 May 2016, at 23:58, Andrew Ferguson andrewferguson500@[redacted].com[HyperCard] <HyperCard-Mailing-List> wrote:
>>> A good example of this would be Uli's thoughts in a message to this group on 23/11/2013 entitled "A script editor without scripts, that learns".
>>
>> I think that was actually a message to the Stacksmith Yahoo group. For those wondering, I'll just copy it in.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -- Uli Kusterer
>> "The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
>> http://stacksmith.org
>>
>>> A script editor without scripts, that learns
>>>

On 08 May 2016, at 05:15, Tim Selander selander@[redacted].attne.jp [HyperCard] <HyperCard-Mailing-List> wrote:
> have noticed that quite a lot of new software I am interested
> in only runs on the latest OSX. Since through this mailing list,
> I have the "ear" of a real honest-to-god developer, I'm curious
> to know what features (bugs?) the new operating systems gives
> developers that prevents better backward compatibility?

There's no big ones, newer OS versions just have lots of small improvements.. Some just involve Apple providing API to do things you would have had to engineer yourself (like placing additional buttons in a window's title bar), others are whole new views for new list styles (which, again, one could have engineered oneself). I think since 10.7 there have also been big improvements in localization. Given that some of this was four years ago, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details.

In the case of Stacksmith (and probably many smaller software developers' products) it is likely a combination of "it's hard enough to make the program do what I want on this OS, I don't want to test everything I write on three other older OS versions just to see if it's broken now" and the fact that Apple's newest versions of its developer tools (Xcode etc.) tend to cut off older versions eventually. In the case of the latest version, the oldest MacOS X Xcode will let me build for is now 10.4 — and I seem to remember that there were some bugs in its support for older OSes (it looks for one particular but very important library in the new location instead of the old) that 10.8 is a more realistic minimum.

Supporting an older OS is hard work. Not only do you need a computer that will still run it, if an issue occurs, you will need to be able to track down its reason, which usually means building the application on that older OS and running it in the debugger there, which in turn means using an older version of Xcode, which means you lose many helpful features that make development faster... And every older OS version you support means you have to verify each feature an extra time on an extra computer.

Now add to that that Stacksmith is a completely new program, still in development. By the time I release a final version, Apple will probably be at 10..13. So I'll try to support the newest, and maybe one back if the newest was quite a while ago, or cost a lot of money, or dropped support for many computers.

Hope that helps explain the rationale a bit.
-- Uli Kusterer
https://stacksmith.org <https://stacksmith.org/>;