The fact that there are applications that work on Leopard and not on older systems has little to do with broken APIs. Treating third-party vendors as valued partners in expanding OS X into a major mass-market computing platform – not making them feel like unwanted irritants that may be swatted down at any moment – would be a good start.Īpple typically supports its products for about 2 years, and they break API compatibility with EVERY release, which typically means once a year.Įh, what? Tell me what broke during the transition from Panther to Tiger? From Tiger to Leopard? Apple releases a new version of OS X every year? There isn’t an ounce of truth in anything that you’ve said. At the very least, a heartfelt “mea culpa” from Apple and straight-up explanation of why they had to make this move would have gone some way to lessening the bruise.Īpple may have learned a lot about shipping successful product since the bad old days of the early 90s, but they’ve still a lot to learn about building developer trust and relations. None of this, however, is of any help or consolation to the unlucky recipients of last WWDC’s surprise kick to the crotch. I mean, I’ve no idea who the poor devil was that got to inform Jobs that Leopard would be six months late, but I bet they’re still sponging him out of the carpet even now. My guess is that with their OS teams spread increasingly thinly across expanding and divergent product lines (Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc.), there was a pressing need to reign in that workload ASAP, lest it get completely out of control (c.f. To be fair to Apple, I doubt they made this decision lightly either. I don’t imagine the Carbon engineers were best pleased seeing a large chunk of their handiwork suddenly flushed down the drain either, but at least Apple was paying them to grin and bear it. Don’t forget that previous Leopards seeds were being shipped to Adobe and other developers with 64-bit Carbon GUI support already largely in place. The surprise itself was that June announcement, which was a total 180-degree reversal of everything Apple had said and promised up until then. I think even Apple appreciate that tossing extremely mature, reliable and optimised codebases that work without extremely good reason is not a sensible way to run a business.Īnd after killing 64-bit Carbon last June, this should have been no surprise.
Not to mention the fact that they’ve been pushing developers to use Cocoa over Carbon,įor new development, sure. While you’re correct that Apple have been pushing CW users to move to Xcode for a while, this has nothing to do with what APIs you use. Xcode and CW are IDEs Carbon and Cocoa are APIs. Well to be fair, Apple has been touting XCode for the last 8 years and wasn’t shy about pushing developers to using them over CodeWarrior.
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