

Alfred for Leopard to stop getting new features after version 0.9 - markahern
http://preppeller.tumblr.com/post/3984137500/leopard

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makecheck
This is kind of the trick with Apple's stuff...historically they've definitely
been willing to blast forward without making backward-compatibility all that
easy. The only problem with the Leopard scenario is that it is the last
possible upgrade for PowerPC-only Macs, which is an unusually early end-of-
life compared to Macs before it.

Somehow I have managed to keep a program working from Mac OS X 10.3.9 onwards
(an OS that is PowerPC-only without support for universal binaries). And this
accomplishment has required a lot of creativity, to put it mildly. As Alfred's
author says, simply choosing the latest OS makes it a lot easier to do cool
stuff; I can't easily use Core Animation or other newer technologies. Also,
Xcode 4 has finally give up on me completely, so I use Xcode 3.x.

If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd almost think it was designed obsolescence,
since there are times I swear I could support another entire OS revision if
not for just 1 or 2 missing APIs. From this point of view, open-source has a
big theoretical advantage because a couple of missing APIs are technically
easy to back-port (but Apple has no reason to spend time on this).

I am glad we at least have Objective-C now, though. There are pretty powerful
ways to check at runtime if almost anything will work before you use it, which
allows for rather flexible binaries. There have been various ways to do this
for C++ APIs beforehand, but Objective-C is much cleaner in this area.

