[sword-devel] Future MacSword

[Greg Hellings]

DM,

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 3:57 PM, DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.

WebKit is currently operative on any system with Qt support, GTK
support, Windows, Mac and a few others (I believe there is a port to
ARM) including a relatively basic port even to wxWidets as well.  I
doubt there's many places it won't run happily?

>
>  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
>
>
>
>
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