Supporting OS X 10.6

We’ve decided to try and support 10.6 for a while so some of our customers can transition off older hardware. (no choruses of “they should upgrade” please. This app is a monitoring system that is not run on normal user machines).

We can build in 2013r3 but prefer to develop in the latest version available, or something close.

Anyway, I have two questions:

  • Should we distribute the 2013r3 builds to all Mac users or were there a lot of Cocoa framework fixes between now and then (which would mean we’d need to build and maintain 10.6 versions and 10.7+ versions).

  • Is there any danger in saving the project in 2013r3 after building (to retain the build counter, etc) or should that be a read-only exercise?

TIA

if you use xojo project format (the text based), you can easily see what Xojo 2013r3 does to your files.

I would make two version. One for newer, one for older version.

I’m interested in this too. My main project is just an in-house database-driven app (for a single digit number of users at the moment), one of which has to stay on 10.6.8 for the moment.

To be on the safe side I’m building everything in the 2013r3 IDE. The user OS versions are 10.6.8, 10.9.5 and 10.10.2.

I’m also wondering if I’m doing it the best way.

If you are using version control, just branch for the older version. Any new features that you add can be merged over as needed.

Depending on how you’re building your system, how feasible would it be to build a Web app?

I’ve had new 20 registrations on 10.6.x in the last 8 weeks
10.6 is far from going anywhere for a while, and a web interface simply won’t work.

My customers won’t benefit from a 2014 or 2015 build (until possibly 64 bit arrives) , so I don’t use them as I’m not ready to lose pre-10.7 customers yet.

Xojo is pretty good at letting you work in one version and build in another, as long as you don’t use the new language features.