LightWave Mac v9.6 Hotfix/Cocoa Update - 30 Sep 2009

[Chuck]

Hi, Mac 'Wavers! :)

Welcome to this week's progress note on our Mac development activities!

Cocoa/Hotfix LightWave v9.6.x: The team continues working on some additional issues to resolve for Snow Leopard compatibility. We think we have the OpenGL issues in Modeler resolved, but we're working now on the problem of some third party tools presenting with a blank UI in the new Mac Cocoa builds. We want to clear those issues before we launch into Open Beta, if possible, and have contacted the involved third parties. We also found that to keep Tiger support, we needed to go to different text drawing APIs for Tiger and for Leopard-and-up, and that work has been time-consuming, but we now have the initial implementation in place just this week.

Basically from this point we feel pretty close, and now every build is being carefully evaluated as a candidate for launching Open Beta. That actually makes this end of the process less predictable - we'll know when we have the good build that we can start, and we won't know where we are until we actually have that build. :stumped:

There are books on that topic of development. :)

That's it for this week!


Please Keep Those Bug Reports Coming: Getting in reports on any bugs you may have encountered but not yet reported is very important. Don't forget to include steps and content, as they are needed to insure that we can duplicate your bug properly and get it fixed. For those of you who need a refresher as to how to report bugs, check this link:

Instructions for Bug Report and Feature Request Database (http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=73227)

[v1u1ant]

Thanks for the update.

[gpdesigner]

thanks for the update Chuck
gp

[PeteS]

wooohooo....excited about the whole cocoa app!

[Limbus]

We also found that to keep Tiger support, we needed to go to different text drawing APIs for Tiger and for Leopard-and-up, and that work has been time-consuming, but we now have the initial implementation in place just this week.


Why is it important to keep Tiger support for LW COcoa? Tiger is almost 5 years old by now and upgrading is possible at no big cost.

[littlewaves]

Why is it important to keep Tiger support for LW COcoa? Tiger is almost 5 years old by now and upgrading is possible at no big cost.

To look at it another way...
Tiger may be nearly 5 years old but Leopard is less than 2 years old and LW9 series started little more than a year after Tiger came out and more than a year before Leopard came out.

So I don't really think it's justifiable to drop support for a major OS version on a point release of the software unless it really did prevent the software from progressing. As far as I can tell so far it's only delayed stuff a little more.

If 9.6.1 was just about 64bit then fair enough but as I understand it's also a traditional point release in that it should fix some bugs too and I reckon Tiger users are entitled to those fixes too

Just my 2 cents. You can probably guess I'm still using Tiger myself.
I realize I'll need to upgrade at some point but kind of figure I'll hold out until my next machine. I'm assuming that 64bit will only be Leopard anyway

I certainly won't be lobbying for tiger support in Core but then I reckon by the time we need to be concerned about that we'll all be using 10.9 (Meerkat?) anyway

[3dworks]

did you check how many LW users are still running tiger today? maybe it would not be worth the trouble... especially as tiger does not even support 64 bit GUI applications...

cheers

markus

[jwiede]

I believe part of the issue is that they only want to support Cocoa UB builds, instead of having to support 32-bit Carbon, 32-bit Cocoa, and 64-bit Cocoa builds. I certainly understand the desire, and support it as long as they can assure plugin compatibility for existing UB plugins on 32-bit Cocoa LW.

[dwburman]

I certainly won't be lobbying for tiger support in Core but then I reckon by the time we need to be concerned about that we'll all be using 10.9 (Meerkat?) anyway

Isn't 10.9 code named Calico?

[littlewaves]

did you check how many LW users are still running tiger today? maybe it would not be worth the trouble... especially as tiger does not even support 64 bit GUI applications...

cheers

markus

you're probably right.

we should do some sort off poll maybe just to see how many people are using tiger still.

If it turns out that I'm the only one then it would make more financial sense for Newtek to just buy me a brand new 8 core Mac Pro with Snow Leopard than to spend more time and money making sure the new build works with tiger.

Whadda ya say Chuck?

[Fadlabi]

Thanks for the update.

[4dartist]

I'm going to really be exited about this release into beta.. I'm getting pretty frustrated with 9.6 and Snow Leopard. Regretting my installation of it. Modeler likes to crash hourly over the last couple days.

[Lightwolf]

we should do some sort off poll maybe just to see how many people are using tiger still.
Well, we've got an absolutely unrepresentative poll running:
http://forums.db-w.com/index.php/topic,424.0.html

Hm, looking at the numbers... a little more than 1% of our forums users actually use OS X and also cared enough to vote :bangwall:

Cheers,
Mike

[Scazzino]

Well, we've got an absolutely unrepresentative poll running:
http://forums.db-w.com/index.php/topic,424.0.html

Hm, looking at the numbers... a little more than 1% of our forums users actually use OS X and also cared enough to vote :bangwall:

Cheers,
Mike

Hi Mike,

I was one of that 1%... ;)

I voted as follows in both polls:

I have switched over to the UB version of LW.
I mostly use Leopard, but I still use Tiger on some older PPC Macs where I need Classic for some older apps that I haven't yet replaced with alternatives. If Leopard ran Classic I would have switched all my Macs over to Leopard...

:D