On Oct 22, 2013, at 2:52 PM, Dan Wilcox wrote:
On Oct 22, 2013, at 1:07 PM, pd-list-request@iem.at wrote:
From: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com Subject: Re: [PD] Building externals on OSX Date: October 22, 2013 1:14:41 PM EDT To: pd-list@iem.at
On 10/21/2013 09:38 PM, Dan Wilcox wrote:
Errr. That's not so easy. You need the 10.5 SDK which you can only get with a *really* old version of Xcode which you probably can't install on anything newer than OSX 10.6. It's possible to put older SDK's themselves into the "right place" but, for something as old as the 10.5 SDK, it may not even work anymore. The only reliabel way to use an old machine with 10.5 or 10.6 and an old version of Xcode, probably Xcode 3.something.
IMHO, at this point, it's best to drop support for PPC for new versions of pd. The *vast vast vast* majority of OSX users have moved on at this point.
Just to make sure I understand: if someone has an old PPC Mac, they cannot run stuff compiled for i386 or x86_64. There is no compatibility-mode or anything they can use to run the software. Is this correct?
Yes. It's a different instruction set and Rosetta, the PCC compatibility layer, won't run an OSX 10.7+.
Also, do you have any references for the claim that the vast majority of OSX users have moved away from PPC?
http://update.omnigroup.com/ (Hardware / CPU type): Intel 97.8% PPC 2.2%
https://www.adium.im/sparkle/ (CPU type): Intel 97.83% PPC 2.71%
I find Jobs' claim that Apple doesn't ship junk to generally be true, and combined with their development model the unfortunate result would seem to be that poor people still using their once sleek and sexy devices are ignored along with their now ugly, unprofitable devices.
Well, those "sleek and sexy" PPC devices were last made & sold in 2005, so it's not a surprise the vast majority of people using OSX have Intel machines mainly because software developers (& the OS) have moved on to 32 bit and now 64 bit intel years ago.
Your political bias notwithstanding (I say use what works for you), I have a 4 year old Apple laptop that still does everything I need with the latest version of OSX and I plan to upgrade to OSX Mavericks when it comes out. That's pretty good, as I had a job when I bought it and I am currently an unemployed artist working on his thesis right now, so it's good this "sleek and sexy device" is not yet an "ugly, unprofitable" one. As with anything, not everyone buys the newest one every iteration and I can say, without any hardware issues whatsoever so far, I got what I paid for.
In any case, I've long thought of helping with the OSX compatibility for Pd (updating GEM to Cocoa/64 bit for instance) but I honestly don't have the time or support right now. Maybe next spring I can do a "reverse kickstarter"?
Pd could definitely use help on Mac OS X. Especially since I've switched to Linux Mint as my desktop OS.
.hc