On Aug 16, 2012, at 19:48 , Stephen Kay < email@hidden> wrote: Again, this where I'm not sure what I'm doing. If you or someone can offer a
suggestion, based on this, I'd greatly appreciate it:
I have a fairly decent number of installed users running the software on
10.4.x ~ 10.6.x (the latter with Rosetta of course). It's a Carbon PPC app
compiled in CW on 10.4.11, against the Current Mac OS (with CW libraries).
The app doesn't leverage any newer Mac technologies; it runs perfectly well
on 10.4 - 10.6. Maybe by accident or luck, but it does. :)
I don't have an answer, but I do have an opinion.
If you're doing this for the love of it, then I think it'd be admirable for you to carefully update your app version by version to support all the OS X releases out there.
However, if this is your income, then I think you're *never* going to recoup anywhere near your development costs if you spend time on older OS X versions (10.4-10.5, with 10.6 joining that club pretty soon). Users who are still back there have already bought your app. You might get some update fees, and they might cheer you for continuing to keep them running, but it's a revenue stream that dwindles as they jump to newer Macs over time -- at which point you lose them as customers unless you're ready with a 10.8-compatible version.
So your port from CW to Xcode is a good thing, and will make it feasible to keep issuing bug fixes for 10.4-10.6, but it's not really getting you anywhere in itself. You need to get to the 10.7-10.8 universe, which means going Intel-only (probably not difficult at all, unless you have asm source or other dependences on older hardware); going 64-bit (probably not too difficult); and going from Carbon to Cocoa.
That last part is what's going to be hard, especially for an app originally architected for CW. The danger is that you fiddle around endlessly, trying to bring it up to date piece by piece (fighting the outdated design all the way), or throw out at least the entire UI and spend a year or two getting back to where you started from.
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