Chuck
I'm not sure that I understand the thrust of your question, but it has
happened over the last couple of OS upgrades that one or two
applications have failed. With the latest, Leopard (v10.5),
Filemaker announced that its current version of Filemaker (v8.5) would
not work with Leopard and that users should not upgrade with Filemaker
8.5 installed. [This is particularly incomprehensible as Filemaker is
owned by Apple ...]
I take you to mean that the OS should remain backwardly compatible
with all earlier applications. I am no programmer, much less a
developer of operating systems, but I should think that that would be
impossible if you aim for improvements in your OS. Indeed, that's
probably one of the problems with Windoze, that each upgrade aims for
backward compatibility and the OS becomes more and more unwieldy to
cope with legacy systems. Perhaps OS/2 lent itself to that sort of
upgrade path better than the current GUI-based OSs (I am on the edge
of my knowledge of OS/2, here :-)).
Upgrading to Leopard has been the most problematic of the OSX
increments, but all the other up-to-date applications have worked or
have been upgraded to work "properly" with Leopard. Indeed, all
applications seemed to work properly for me anyway. But Olympus has
been pretty tardy with ensuring that it would work, but then it's a
pretty horrid programme anyway. Jan's point about demonstrating
commitment to a customer base is a reasonable one, in my view.
Chris
On 30 Jan 2008, at 14:54, <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> wrote:
> Would some enthusiast Mac supporter please explain to me why this
> failure of application software to work on different versions of a
> Mac OS is an application problem. Had this happened to an OS/2
> application whilst I was manager of OS/2 system and compatibility
> testing I'd have had a powerful lot of explaining to do to my
> bosses. New function is wonderful but one *never* breaks old
> function... even if the app developers did it wrong. Incidentally,
> this is one thing Microsoft never quite understood while we were
> jointly working on OS/2 and it took constant vigilance to make sure
> they didn't alter the API's to suit the whim of the day.
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