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Comment on "The Reasons for Leopard-Only Apps"
by David — Jan 04
1. Vanish, nowhere did I say that the Omni Group make "strictly" technical apps. That just happens to be their focus, as a quick look at their product lineup will show. Clearly, obviously, their applications are geared towards a somewhat different user than, say, a typical iLife application.

2. David Young writes:

Dropping Tiger support makes financial sense because a) statistics (both from Omni and those I've observed myself) prove that 90% of the Mac user base upgrades to the latest within a reasonable time frame and b) supporting Tiger adds +100% to your testing load. At some point in time, you'll be spending an extra +100% in testing to gain %10 of the market, which is a crappy investment of your engineering time.

You must have access to statistics that are very different from mine. I disagree entirely that the 90% of the Mac user base upgrades quickly to a new OS. Certainly the bloggers and contributers hereabouts will do so, but the broad base of Mac users? No way.

Anyway, it's up for each developer to do the math himself. If you're developing a brand new product, or are able to to build a new version of an existing product and sell both, then then Leopard is probably a no-brainer.

A final caution: developers shouldn't get carried away about Brand New Feature X. Something like Core Animation may well be neat, but putting it to use in a shippable application is still a major task, requiring all the usual design, testing, re-design, etc. You may get instant functionality, but you don't get an instant product, let alone a good one. Similarly, switching over from one animation/rendering technology in an existing product is a far trickier task than designing with that tech from the ground-up.
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