Since I've started to write software myself, I've had to follow a lot more of Apple's decisions, and while the sheer pace of it is frustrating (I currently spend three months of every year playing catch-up, and I can't see that changing any time soon) it's also very, very exciting: I get to see the reasoning behind changes, and all the new goodness they introduce to make developers' lives (and ultimately customers' lives) better.
10.7 broke a crap ton of stuff because it dropped PowerPC support. 10.9–11 broke very little. 10.12, by the sound of it, will break an unspecified number of legacy apps. (By 'legacy' I mean using technology deprecated in 10.8 [2012]). This means that developers had 4-5 years to update their apps, and anything not updated in that timeframe probably...
... well, I still mourn the odd OS9 app. I totally get that one comes to rely on something and then it breaks, and I'd adore to have ColorIt back (a PowerPC image editor, and my all-time favourite) ...
... but in the end, anything not updated for five years is probably dated anyway. The other side of the coin are all those instances of 'wow, I can do *that* with only a few lines of code? That's so useful' moments I'm having every time a new OS is announced.
Here's another thing. The closer developers stick to Apple's frameworks, the easier it is to update code to run on the current system. The cleverer developers think they are, the more likely their code is to break when those exploits are no longer possible. And the better Apple's tools become, the easier it will not only to be to write software, but to write great software with the standard toolbox, which lessens the load involved in updating.
So in a way, software that does not run on the next (and next, and next) system is very often a sign that the developers were just as mentally locked into their old tools/ways/tricks as users are.
I've done the 'but I'm perfectly happy with this, I don't wanna learn a new tool' a few times now. HTML tables vs. CSS (learning CSS was a pain, but it's So Useful, I should have done that way earlier). Certain aspects of Filemaker scripts. Cocoa Autolayout. And every time I eventually have to learn New Thing anyway. So I'm holding out on principles - software subscriptions? Never - but otherwise trying to go with the flow, even if I hate parting with old habits.
no subject
10.7 broke a crap ton of stuff because it dropped PowerPC support. 10.9–11 broke very little. 10.12, by the sound of it, will break an unspecified number of legacy apps. (By 'legacy' I mean using technology deprecated in 10.8 [2012]). This means that developers had 4-5 years to update their apps, and anything not updated in that timeframe probably...
... well, I still mourn the odd OS9 app. I totally get that one comes to rely on something and then it breaks, and I'd adore to have ColorIt back (a PowerPC image editor, and my all-time favourite) ...
... but in the end, anything not updated for five years is probably dated anyway. The other side of the coin are all those instances of 'wow, I can do *that* with only a few lines of code? That's so useful' moments I'm having every time a new OS is announced.
Here's another thing. The closer developers stick to Apple's frameworks, the easier it is to update code to run on the current system. The cleverer developers think they are, the more likely their code is to break when those exploits are no longer possible. And the better Apple's tools become, the easier it will not only to be to write software, but to write great software with the standard toolbox, which lessens the load involved in updating.
So in a way, software that does not run on the next (and next, and next) system is very often a sign that the developers were just as mentally locked into their old tools/ways/tricks as users are.
I've done the 'but I'm perfectly happy with this, I don't wanna learn a new tool' a few times now. HTML tables vs. CSS (learning CSS was a pain, but it's So Useful, I should have done that way earlier). Certain aspects of Filemaker scripts. Cocoa Autolayout. And every time I eventually have to learn New Thing anyway. So I'm holding out on principles - software subscriptions? Never - but otherwise trying to go with the flow, even if I hate parting with old habits.