

Developers: Quick Get “Retina-Ready” Or Risk Abandonment - mrkmcknz
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/16/developers-quick-get-retina-ready-or-risk-abandonment/

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psychotik
Apple's done a couple of _really_ bad things here:

1) Developers who build without XCode 4.3.1 and iOS 5.1 SDK cannot leverage
the retina display, even if they embed hi-res images in their app.

2) In order to use XCode 4.3.1 and iOS 5.1 SDK, you MUST be running OSX Lion.
You can not install it on Snow Leopard. This is bad - Apple has always
supported "up to two versions back" but now, for a minor version release, has
abandoned support for an OS that is still 'current'. Mountain Lion isn't
released yet, and hence Lion and Snow Leopard and the last two versions.

What this means is developers who need to update their apps have to first buy
OSX Lion (many have been legitimately holding off because it's pretty crappy,
overall). This is specially worse for developers who build OSX and iOS apps -
upgrading an OS and expecting your apps to "just work" isn't practical. I was
just waiting to skip to Mountain Lion directly, but this forces me to pay
Apple, test on and use Lion for a few months even though I don't want to.

Forcing developers to upgrade their OS just to support a .1 SDK update is a
cheap, non-classy move by Apple.

~~~
daed
As a fellow iOS developer I feel your pain - I've been dreading the forced
move to Lion since Lion's release. I haven't researched this yet but a
possible solution would be to install Lion and Xcode on a VM? Then you could
update the OS as frequently as you liked and not have to worry about it
breaking the rest of your workflow/implementing "features" like Automatic
Termination (my main reason for avoiding Lion).

~~~
psychotik
I'm following <http://stackoverflow.com/a/9728951/106095>, and it seems like
it might work. But yes, I'm glad Apple's EULA now finally allows VMs.

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rhizome
I'm sorry, but this title is too ridiculous to pass without comment. Consider
the source.

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warmfuzzykitten
Or, really, just test with 5.1 and fix the frickin' bugs. My wife reports a
number of her games have stopped working. Not sure whose fault it is - Apple
is secretive and developers are lazy - but these transitions are always rocky
for her.

