[sword-devel] Future MacSword

[DM Smith]

Manfred Bergmann wrote:
> it would be a Leopard only  
> application.
> IIRC the majority of users that had questions about MacSword actually  
> were using Leopard.
>   

We have thought about which OSes we should support for BibleDesktop. The 
conclusion was to support at least the current and the previous and to 
not actively support earlier versions. We also concluded that we would 
not knowingly prevent earlier platforms from running the latest release 
without great gain.

The way this came about is that we upgraded to Java 5. This was over a 
year after Tiger had been released. I had just gotten a Mac Mini with 
Tiger and was un-aware that Java 5 would never be ported to Panther. 
Within the next few weeks we got reports that it wouldn't run on 
Panther. We then downgraded back to Java 1.4.2.

Our target users include missionaries, pastors, churches, ... with old, 
hand-me-down laptops.

At the time, BD was not close to being feature complete and had some 
nagging bugs. For support reasons, it was not the appropriate time to 
make such a change. I didn't want to be suggesting that a user had to 
pay money (for an OS upgrade) to use our software.

Once we are reasonably feature complete and relatively bug free, we plan 
to do a major development shift to using WebKit (or its equivalent on 
other platforms). This may prevent us from running on older OSes.

If you were to announce a MacSword upgrade, I think that many would want 
to get the upgrade. Especially since your beta is so much better than 1.2.x.

All this is to recommend that Leopard is very recent and Tiger shouldn't 
be abandoned just yet.

-- DM