Target Mac OS X?

[maaaaark]

I'm just curious to the target OS that you all aim to support. My guess would be the majority is for 10.2.8? Who can really justify 10.3? I know 10.3 only broke non-USB G3's :cry:, so you wouldn't be losing much of a market from 10.2.8 support to 10.3 support, save those who do not want to pay for an upgrade.

Comments?

[OneSadCookie]

Having programmed Cocoa with Bindings, there's no way I'd support 10.2.x for any GUI apps any more :love:

As for games, it depends on the requirements, bugs, and my laziness. I'd try to support 10.2.6-10.2.8 if it wasn't too much extra work :)

[ThemsAllTook]

I go for 10.2.8 and above. There's really no point in supporting anything earlier nowadays.

- Alex Diener

[arekkusu]

I'm still targeting 10.2.8 for some apps, but there are good reasons to require Panther. Every hour I spend working around Jaguar bugs/lack of API is an hour a feature doesn't get worked on.

Some of my apps use 10.3-only features (mostly coregraphics stuff) and in these cases I just consider them Jaguar compatible for the low price of $129.

When Tiger hits there will be much more compelling reasons to raise the minimum requirement. ;)

[AnotherJake]

Every hour I spend working around Jaguar bugs/lack of API is an hour a feature doesn't get worked on.
That pretty much sums it up right there I would say. It's difficult to justify too much backwards compatibility as an indie dev in most cases since the available man-hours just aren't there. Supporting graphics cards/hardware seems more important than OS versions. I stopped thinking about older OS versions too much after I saw a few polls at popular Mac sites showing nearly 90% of users using the newest OS version after only a few months after release. I only have so much time available, and the mass of the market is using the "new stuff" so why fight for scraps? In military tactical terms it's called "economy of force". In economic tactical terms it's called "reaping the low hanging fruit first". Large companies have mass and momentum. Small devs have mobility. This means that in order to capitalize on our greatest strength as indie developers we must constantly move with our target. That's my philosophy anyway. I'm shooting primarily for 10.3 and above, but 10.2.6/10.2.8 is possible if it doesn't waste too much time.

[maaaaark]

With my real world experience at a certain place, I am very suprised by the number of people who have not (and are able... such as G4 owners) upgraded to 10.3.

[AnotherJake]

Which is very important to consider as well, but the big question to me is... Are those the kinds of people who would be either seeking out or stumbling upon my games online? I'm looking for what I call 'hipsters' or 'new Mac spenders', the ones with a decent online connection and willing to use a credit card to put something on their (relatively) new Mac. They're also the ones that might be more willing to fork out for an OS upgrade and be up to date in my mind. In MY real world experience almost everyone uses a Windows PC and they get their games from their friends for free. My point being that what you see in the "real world" is not necessarily who you are trying to sell to.

[Malarkey]

Having programmed Cocoa with Bindings, there's no way I'd support 10.2.x for any GUI apps any more :love:

Or even the expanded key-value coding protocol. It gets kind of tedious writing getters and setters that have to do the whole retain/release thing.

[maaaaark]

AnotherJake, good comment. Of course, I don't see any % of profits at the place I view my real world experience ;) When it comes to my own games, I have yet to decide ;)

[iefan]

Having programmed Cocoa with Bindings, there's no way I'd support 10.2.x for any GUI apps any more :love:

I'm waiting for CoreData. No more messing with libraries and stuff to build databases! For games I have no idea. I write more applications than games. I haven't seen anything that will greatly excite me over what I have done for games so far. We'll see when I get my copy of Tiger though.

Right now, most of my applications are Cocoa for 10.3. I use bindings a lot, like OSC. Removing tedium from application development makes me happy.