Monday, September 14, 2009

Bitten by Snow Leopard

After a merciless 2 weeks of being bit by Snow Leopard, big updates to 5 WBC products (iDupe, Cast Away, MoveTunes, CaliBrate, and OmniGrowl) will be out within an hour. Thanks for your patience!

The
compatibility status of all other products are still unknown, but unfortunately those will have to wait while we turn to other obligations for a while. Apologies to users of DevonSync and ThinkArch for the delay, and Snow Leopard bug reports with logs will be very helpful.

Since this is our blog, let me take the opportunity to rant just a little. While Snow Leopard is fantastic in many respects, despite the fact that it has been advertised as fixing long-standing bugs, the number of bugs it introduced for developers is actually quite massive. Most of the past two weeks have been nearly sleepless and I have tried to work around these bugs. Complicating matters is that what works on one system may fail badly on another. For instance, many bugs in the Snow Leopard developer tools are revealed on intel Macs running Leopard, while not affecting PowerPC macs running Leopard. Supporting all the possible combinations of OS versions, chipsets, and iApps versions is a nearly insurmountable challenge for small developers with limited test environments. I have 5 computers in my household and its still not enough to test all combinations! For users then, it is very important to be specific about your system when reporting bugs, and to understand that the product may work on one platform but not on your system because there was no or limited opportunity to test. To conclude this rant, let me say that my feelings about Apple have plummeted in the past two weeks. While they advertise how everything "just works" they do not appeciate that it takes developers like us to make sure that is true, and we are treated badly when we are made to work so hard to work around the bugs they introduce. End rant.

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