[Interest] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant...

Turtle Creek Software support at turtlesoft.com
Mon Dec 19 22:07:12 CET 2022


Not to get into a flame war over Apple, but the processor changes actually
were not so bad.  Changing languages and frameworks was the biggest
problem.

Going Pascal to C++ was easy because our app was only in prototype stage,
so we just started over.  CodeWarrior was a joy, and they made it easy to
move to PPC Carbon. Then they died.
Moving to Intel wasn't too bad because all the byte-swapping was already
written for the Windows version.  The worst part was early XCode, but that
gradually improved.

Cocoa and Objective-C were a nightmare.  3 programmer-years and probably
only 1/3 done.  Mystery crashes.  With Swift and SwiftUI on the horizon,
writing native for Mac seemed doomed for an
app with a lot of C++ business logic and small user base.  Hence the switch
to Qt.  Hopefully it's not going from frying pan to fire.

There was a time when the Mac Product Registry had at least a thousand
great apps for Mac. Very few of them survived the jolts.
Casey McD

On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 10:59 AM Michael Jackson <
mike.jackson at bluequartz.net> wrote:

> Just some clarifications:
>
>
>
> Apple used 68K processors from 1984 to 1994. 10 Years of use.
>
>
>
> Apple Started using PPC in 1994 (Announced in 1992) and their last PPC
> machine was in 2006. 12 Years of use.
>
>
>
> Apple started using x86 in 2006 and their last x86 machine was in 2020
> (which is still in production). 14+ years of use ( and macOS still
> officially supports x86 releases)
>
>
>
> Apple started using Arm64 in 2020….
>
>
>
> So not really a “jolt every 3 years”. You have had 3 _*total*_ jolts over
> the course of 30 years.
>
>
>
> --
>
> Mike Jackson
>
>
>
> *From: *Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Turtle
> Creek Software <support at turtlesoft.com>
> *Date: *Sunday, December 18, 2022 at 10:24 AM
> *To: *Qt Interest <interest at qt-project.org>
> *Subject: *Re: [Interest] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant...
>
>
>
> We sell to construction companies.  They are not computer geeks, and often
> run the original OS until the machine dies.  Given the flakiness of some
> Mac OS upgrades, that may be ideal policy.
>
>
>
> Apple moves far too fast with chip, OS and language changes. It's hard for
> small developers to keep up. We started on 680x0, Pascal and Toolbox.
> That's 3 chips, 3 languages and 3 OS frameworks ago. A jolt every 3 years.
>
>
>
> We gave up on Xcode/Cocoa since Obj-C seemed doomed and we have too much
> C++ code to ever port to Swift and/or SwiftUI.  I imagine Qt faces the same
> problems, but on a more system level.
>
>
>
> If Qt Co does not have the resources to support more than 3 years of OS
> versions, then please at least create some good stopping points that
> solidly support older Mac OS versions. Explain which to use for which OS
> ranges. Then, developers may need to build multiple apps.  That kinda
> sucks, but it's better than losing/annoying users because they don't want
> the expense/pain of new hardware.
>
>
>
> Casey McDermott
>
> TurtleSoft.com
>
> _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list
> Interest at qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
>
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