With Leopard on the horizon, the issue of OS support becomes apparent, is it important to support Tiger, or do we embrace Leopard with a great big hug, and forget about previous OS versions?
Leopard introduces lovely new features, which the Escapers would love to use, but do we do this at the expense of backwards compatibility?
We really want to know what everyone thinks about this, so let us know.
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17 comments:
Always embrace the future wholeheartedly. In certain instances backwards compatibility is very important. Chat clients, word processors, etc. But there's a reason TextMate 2.0 is going to be Leopard-only; 99% of the people who use TextMate will be running Leopard. The niche you are most likely going to reach is a group people who want the latest and the greatest, and live on the bleeding edge. They will most likely have Leopard the day it comes out, so it seems silly to support Tiger for the next year or two.
Come on people... MOST users will not update to Leopard for at least 6 months to a year or more. To only support leopard and try and catch the bleeding edge users is going to lose the majority of your intended audience. Just like with the iPhone, many more will sell after the second generation release rather than the first. Most people wait to see how it pans out before upgrading, so for those, like brandon who want all the new features and don't care about those that wait, I say too bad. To abandon Tiger users is the worst thing you can do. We are looking at purchasing licenses for Flux, but I am the decision maker on the systems we use. I just switched our entire office from Windows to Mac OS for our Workstations 6 months ago. I am not about to upgrade all of them to Leopard just because of bleeding edge enthusiasts. You drop support for Tiger, and you we drop support for you and Flux.
Jbardi - Yes, I think business users have different priorities than enthusiasts, stability and consistency is probably the most important thing. I know Mac users in a company who haven't even been upgraded to 10.3!
Jumping straight into a new OS and scrapping all previous version support is a crazy idea from a business perspective. You're cutting off a shed load of potential users (read: 'paying customers') which a young company such as yourselves really needs to survive.
I'll be upgrading to Leopard in October (when I also purchase a new MacBook Pro) so I'm not being biased towards one OS or another, but 90% of my Mac using friends wont be. Many still use Panther or are sticking with Tiger.
Support Tiger for a year or so (many software houses still do support Panther!)
You obviously must be aware of the fact that there is much competition out there in this market place (RapidWeaver, Goldfish, iWeb, Sandvox etc.) who already have a fair chunk of the market so you need to be offering something decent which 'blanket covers' as much market as it can.
To say that only Leopard has cutting edge features is also nonsense (if you actually do the analysis, there aint that much difference between Tiger and Leopard... DON'T believe the Apple hype and fanboy opinions please!)
Good software is good software. Good software doesn't depend on the latest eye-candy and gimmicks. Good software is stable, gets the job done and hopefully fun and intuitive to use.
Good luck.
Hi John,
We've had a mix of opinions on this, some "in real life" and on email too. I think we're coming down on your side at the moment, we've had a look at Leopard, and it does offer some nice stuff for developers, mostly UI stuff, which though very pleasant, it's not critical to the Flux. So Tiger compatibility will be with us for the foreseeable future.
Cheers.
That IS good news.
Putting all my previous comments aside, the most important part of any web authoring package (for me) is that I can develop great, professional looking sites with the minimum of fuss (one of the reasons I loath the 'necessary evil' that is Dreamweaver!)
Keep those Flux updates coming.
All the best for the future.
Definitely drop Tiger support. Leopard has too many enhancements on the backend that will also be felt by us, the users, to ignore those Leopard-only enhancements. Really, the customer base to which you're catering is not the group that is satisfied with Dreamweaver, etc. and we really want the best and the most productive tool. And we want you to be empowered to deliver this tool.
99%, if not more, of your users will not mind this jump. You'll have a couple of folks crying, but the rest of us will certainly lather praise and be very excited to see what you can now bring to the table.
I wholeheartedly agree with george. There's already a lot of web design apps out there, and Flux clearly wants to position itself as cutting edge and Apple-like. People who appreciate this the most will be the people who will use Leopard from day 1. Leopard brings an awful lot of new possibilities for developers, and it would be stupid to ignore them - potential buyers of Flux will love to get an app that already makes use of Leopards features.
To those who say that users will wait several months before adopting Leopard: well, this kind of users will also not buy Flux immediately, since it's still in beta currently, and will be a 1.0 after that. By the time Flux will be interesting for this non-cutting-edge kind of users, Leopard will be, too. :-)
I just got an iPhone, so lepoard will have to wait a while
While I understand grasping Leopard features and technologies, you can't leave your customer base behind. BUT... do what Adobe and others do, start with an alpha version that is Leopard only and take your time to make sure that you are getting the best advantage of it. KEEP this Alpha internal or a VERY select few as Adobe and other will keep up with what you offer and Patent any great ideas only to sue you later when the reality is YOU should have patented it yourselves.
Most users that are potential buyers of your software should be updating to Leopard within a few months and that's what counts for you.
I don't mind if you fully support Leopard and ditch 10.4 for that. Geeks will upgrade as soon as Leopard comes out.
Hi all,
Thanks to everyone for the comments, we can see there are some really good arguments on both sides here. As developers, we'd love to take full advantage of Leopard from day one, but like many have said, we can't just yank out support from the feet of paying customers. So basically, the plan is this: We're going to keep Tiger support for a while yet, until we're happy Leopard has *very* widespread adoption. However, we've been looking at some Leopard features and seen that we can use a lot of them, but provide fall-back code for Tiger, not everything is feasible, but a lot is, and that's what we're going to try to do, have our cake and eat it, provide Leopard features but keep Tiger compatibility.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to write, the comments are noted, and we're really trying to keep everyone on both sides of the fence happy. Cheers!
Web developers should up to speed with their software and knowledge. I am curious by nature and an early adopter, which is probably why I like to design for the web. Especially since you are still in beta (right?) I would concentrate on Leopard development and degrade gracefully if possible, or omit features in the Tiger version.
Hi Florian,
Yes, we're still in beta right now, hopefully that'll change very soon, but when we release a non-beta, we want to be sure Flux deserves that status, so we're not going to rush into it.
What you've said pretty much sums up what we're thinking, we're not going to hold back Flux if Leopard offers great features, but nor are we going to leave our customers in the lurch if they decide to stick with Tiger for a while yet.
Cheers.
Ouch. Dropping Tiger already seems like a bad idea from a market share standpoint. According to Steve's WWDC talk this year, of 22 million mac users, 67% are using Tiger, with 23% on Panther, and 10% on older versions. This is over two years after Tiger's release. Think of it like this: A third of Mac OS X users aren't using the current OS.. Two years after its' release. Dropping Tiger support isn't a wise decision based on that logic; indeed, the general rule of thumb followed by devs is to support one release back for as long as possible. Agreed, those people aren't necessarily your target market, but even as a power user and developer, I feel that I will be sticking with Tiger on my systems until my next system purchase - after Macworld.
Hey Rich,
I've never seen those stats before, quite interesting, I would have guessed fewer people were still on Panther, guess maybe users are not so quick to upgrade as I thought.
So that reinforces our view here that we're going to keep Tiger support for a while yet
To be honest, we did not know what our target market was until we released Flux. We had a gut feeling we'd be selling to web-design enthusiasts more than people doing it for a living, but so far sales have not reflected that, so we're kind of adapting a little to serving the professional market more than we thought we would be. That means we need to ensure backwards compatibility a bit more than we thought, as companies don't upgrade on a whim, but enthusiasts do.
Thanks for the comment, those figures have made me think a bit more about support for older Mac OS versions.
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