Not to get into a flame war over Apple, but the processor changes actually were not so bad. Changing languages and frameworks was the biggest problem.
Going Pascal to C++ was easy because our app was only in prototype stage, so we just started over. CodeWarrior was a joy, and they made it easy to move to PPC Carbon. Then they died. Moving to Intel wasn't too bad because all the byte-swapping was already written for the Windows version. The worst part was early XCode, but that gradually improved. Cocoa and Objective-C were a nightmare. 3 programmer-years and probably only 1/3 done. Mystery crashes. With Swift and SwiftUI on the horizon, writing native for Mac seemed doomed for an app with a lot of C++ business logic and small user base. Hence the switch to Qt. Hopefully it's not going from frying pan to fire. There was a time when the Mac Product Registry had at least a thousand great apps for Mac. Very few of them survived the jolts. Casey McD On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 10:59 AM Michael Jackson < mike.jack...@bluequartz.net> wrote: > Just some clarifications: > > > > Apple used 68K processors from 1984 to 1994. 10 Years of use. > > > > Apple Started using PPC in 1994 (Announced in 1992) and their last PPC > machine was in 2006. 12 Years of use. > > > > Apple started using x86 in 2006 and their last x86 machine was in 2020 > (which is still in production). 14+ years of use ( and macOS still > officially supports x86 releases) > > > > Apple started using Arm64 in 2020…. > > > > So not really a “jolt every 3 years”. You have had 3 _*total*_ jolts over > the course of 30 years. > > > > -- > > Mike Jackson > > > > *From: *Interest <interest-boun...@qt-project.org> on behalf of Turtle > Creek Software <supp...@turtlesoft.com> > *Date: *Sunday, December 18, 2022 at 10:24 AM > *To: *Qt Interest <interest@qt-project.org> > *Subject: *Re: [Interest] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant... > > > > We sell to construction companies. They are not computer geeks, and often > run the original OS until the machine dies. Given the flakiness of some > Mac OS upgrades, that may be ideal policy. > > > > Apple moves far too fast with chip, OS and language changes. It's hard for > small developers to keep up. We started on 680x0, Pascal and Toolbox. > That's 3 chips, 3 languages and 3 OS frameworks ago. A jolt every 3 years. > > > > We gave up on Xcode/Cocoa since Obj-C seemed doomed and we have too much > C++ code to ever port to Swift and/or SwiftUI. I imagine Qt faces the same > problems, but on a more system level. > > > > If Qt Co does not have the resources to support more than 3 years of OS > versions, then please at least create some good stopping points that > solidly support older Mac OS versions. Explain which to use for which OS > ranges. Then, developers may need to build multiple apps. That kinda > sucks, but it's better than losing/annoying users because they don't want > the expense/pain of new hardware. > > > > Casey McDermott > > TurtleSoft.com > > _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list > Interest@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest >
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