I'm wondering why Plaxo makes its users download a Pref Pane to sync with Address Book. Why doesn't Plaxo use an Exchange server? (since Address Book supports this)
Anyone have any ideas why one approach is preferred over the other?
OS X didn't have Exchange support until 10.6 (Snow Leopard), so they probably want to support older versions of OS X. Also, then they'd have to buy an Exchange server, or force others to do so.
Related
I can't find information on what are the system requirements for Mac for the mobile add-on for Delphi XE4 (Professional).
My understanding is that XCode is still required to sign the app binary and to deploy it on a test device and/or App Store.
Our Mac is so old that the minimum requirement of OSX for the latest XCode won't even install.
I'd like to know if we need to have the Mac upgraded to accomodate this.
Ok - found the answer: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/rad-studio-data-sheet.pdf second page:
PC running Windows connected with an Intel-based Mac, with 2 GB RAM
or more, running OS X
10.8 (Mountain Lion) or 10.7 (Lion) over a local area network using a SSH, VNC or Windows file sharing solution
Apologies & much appreciated if you've attempted to help me:
XCode will still be required, so of course your Mac system will have to be updated to be able to support it.
The documentation for XE3 will give you the minimums requirements for that version, and you should require XE4 to at least require those minimum requirements. As it doesn't seem your existing system meets those, you can probably be sure it won't support the requirements for XE4.
You can also contact Embarcadero Sales with pre-sales question, with the email address you'd expect (Sales at the companyname.com).
I'm developing something for Mac OS X. It's a port of a Windows product.
One of my boss' concerns is how it will run on older versions of Mac OS X. I know Xcode has facilities for compiling for old versions of Mac OS X, but QA would prefer to actually run the older versions of Mac OS X on a Macintosh.
Since we got into Macintosh development after Snow Leopard was released, all of our machines come with Snow Leopard (10.6). As far as I know, you can't really walk into a store to buy Leopard (10.5) and anything prior to that is basically extinct.
In a question on virtualization someone said that they've done multi-boot or multiple hard drives for other versions of Mac OS X, but I'm not sure how one would obtain the install media or the license for an old version.
I see Apple has their Mac Developer Program which touts as one of its features as "access pre-release versions of the latest software" which is cool, but I don't see it anywhere on there that old versions of Mac OS X are available. Does Apple have an MSDN-equivalent where old versions of the software are available for download?
Also, is there a reliable breakdown somewhere of the rate of upgrades/updates to Mac OS X? (i.e., what % of users still run Mac OS X 10.5, 10.4, PPC-based machines, etc.)
In case you buy an old OS X from Amazon or other retailers, note that you can not install an OS which was released before the hardware was announced. Older OSes just don't have the required driver to be able to run on a newer machine, and Apple doesn't back-port drivers for older OSes. In other words, if you buy the latest new Mac from Apple, you can't install 10.5 or 10.4 or whatever. So, you need to buy an old Mac too, not just an old OS.
The breakdown of the OS ratio really depends on the software. For example, the veritable Omnigroup publishes this version breakdown of the hits of their software update server. There are many websites which tell you the version break down, see e.g. this site.
Judging from it, I would say Snow Leopard covers half of the Macs in the world. Supporting Leopard might be worth while if you have extra resources. But I would guess people who didn't buy Snow Leopard won't typically buy a new 3rd party app, so supporting Leopard won't give you 50% increase in the number of potential buyers. (I admit this last sentence is completely subjective, though.)
Apple Developer Connection does have most older OS version available for download, but it's not quite from a complete collection (specifically, they're missing a full install of 10.4.anything for Intel CPUs). They do have the GM builds of 10.6.0 (which is Intel only), 10.5.0 (Intel/PPC universal), 10.4.0 (PPC only), 10.3.0, and 10.2.0.
As others have said, you won't be able to use older versions of the OS on newer hardware, so you're going to have to get used computers for testing -- if purchasing doesn't like eBay &c, look for a company that specializes in used equipment, like PC Recycle. For maximum coverage, I'd recommend getting an Intel Mac that shipped with 10.4 (and make sure you get the installer disks that came with it), and a PPC Mac with that's as old as possible while still having a 867MHz+ G4 CPU (so you can run 10.5 on it, and don't have to worry about weird G5 builds) (again, be sure to get its original disks 'cause an older generic installer won't work).
One option (besides acquiring old OS versions yourself) is to use the compatibility labs that Apple maintains. Lots of machines, old and new, already set up with many different versions of the OS.
I believe you can get a "day pass" to the labs for ~$100. Depending on where exactly you're located and the cost of getting to Cupertino, this may or may not be a viable option for you.
http://developer.apple.com/labs/
As others noted, a number of sellers on Amazon have boxed old versions of the OS.
Historically, people used to boot off external Firewire drives to use older or beta OS versions, but of course some of the newer machines lack Firewire ports. I know EFI does support some external boot options (netboot for instance).
It might be possible to boot newer Intel hardware using a late version of 10.4 - but I couldn't guarantee it (as another poster noted, 10.4 won't have relevant hardware drivers - but there are basic generic drivers that may work. Then again, is that a realistic test???).
As an addition to Yuji's post - there are some people who are forced to stick with Leopard or Tiger for compatibility reasons (my father can't upgrade all the machines at his school, because the A3 colour printer only has generic printer support under Snow Leopard, and they also have a lot of older Adobe software). I would say that generally this applies more with institutional customers - for educational software running on 10.4, and even running on PowerPC hardware, can still be a significant issue.
For consumer software - less so - the big spike in Mac sales came after the switch to Intel, and almost all active consumer software purchasers are on Intel machines running 10.5 or later.
The other thing that needs to be considered is that 10.4 is missing many APIs introduced in 10.5 and 10.6.
We are a Microsoft shop with C++ experience looking to get into some iPhone/iPad development.
Before we make a large investment in individual development machines, we would like to test our abilities with a modest investment.
Can we use one Mac Mini Snow Leopard Server as a development machine for 2-3 concurrent users? We would want them to remote from their PCs into the Mac Mini server and develop remotely.
Is this possible?
It sounds like you're about to break Joel's "Don't torture your developers" rule.
Skimping on hardware is a good way to waste expensive developer time, which will lead to unhappy developers and failed projects.
Since a Mac with a Windows license can be turned into a Windows development machine, you could buy Macs instead of generic Windows PCs as your existing development hardware hits its replacement dates, and have the flexibility to do either Windows or Mac development.
I think it's worth re-evaluating this initiative as to whether there's enough commitment behind it to make it succeed.
Not out of the box. Mac OS X server is not designed for multiple concurrent desktop access users like a Windows Terminal Server. Edit Here is a product that will do that. http://www.aquaconnect.net/
The Mac Mini is not any major power house either. Emulating the iPhone would not be feasible either since (at last I knew) all Mac Mini's were dual core.
That is a very interesting question which I do not know the answer to, but I will still be cheeky and post a reply. The cheapest Mac Mini is $599 and Mac OS X Server costs $499 so it might be worth just buying two Mac Minis for an additional cost of $100.
I do hope someone here has experience of a similar setup to what you have in mind.
A Mac Mini isn't enough oomph to do that; it's basically a low-end laptop, after all. You could do it with aquaconnect and an XServe, but it might be cheaper just to buy some KVMs and a few Mac Minis and give the developers one each.
On Windows, testing different OSes is made simple using VMs. Is there a simple way to do something similar for Mac testing, where I might need to run on Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard to verify functionality?
AFAICT, to run OS X in a VM you need OSX server or buy multiple Macs - is that what folks out there do? Or are there other cheaper options?
Due to the license, you must use Mac OS X Server if you'd like to virtualize. If you get an early Intel mac that will run 10.4, you could partition the disk and install 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 simultaneously, though rebooting in to each OS can be a hassle.
These days there are more Mac OS X variants to test than just major OS releases. Depending on your target customers, you might also want to test on PPC, i386, and x86_64 architectures.
If you're lucky enough to live near Cupertino, Beijing, or Tokyo, and you're an ADC Select or Premiere member, you can use the ADC compatibility labs for this sort of testing.
That said, you could probably pick up a couple of older machines pretty inexpensively and get somewhat varied hardware.
You could have a single Mac with different partitions for each OS, or you could virtualise OS X server. Within the constraints of Apple's Mac OS X EULA you cannot virtualise Mac OS X.
The paid-for memberships of Apple's developer connection include the ability to download and use a range of previous versions of OS X and OS X Server for developer testing purposes. As the select membership is $500 and OS X Server is $499 then I'd think that's going to be cheaper if you want to test more than one variant of the server.
I would like to test software designed to run on a Mac and would need a couple of OS versions (old ones, too) and maybe other Mac software to set up my (virtual) test machines.
For the same scenario on Windows, I can use the licenses available via TechNet or MSDN subscriptions. At the ADC Mac Dev Center, I couldn't find any specific information as to what is available. Does an ADC membership get me downloads of software / OS's to test against? If not, what is available?
Bear in mind that I don't believe any version of Mac OS (barring OS X Server) is licensed for use in a VM. In theory, if you want to test different versions of the OS you'll need to do either multiple installs on a single system (My first iMac came with OS 9 and OS X installed this way, not sure you could get multiple OS X versions installed on a single box) or have lots of boxes.
Yes it does. You can download the operating systems as well as betas (although not as early as "proper" beta testers).