older mac/ snow leopard/ support for less than iOS 4.3

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

hello everyone,

just thought i’d share some findings on support for older macs, snow leopard, support for older iOS version <4.3

so im using an old macbook early 2006 (not compatible with Lion) and xcode 3.2.6 (1761) with the latest corona build.

  • tested. works great on new iPad, ipad, iphone4 running 5.1 (+)
  • tested. works on 3gs running 4.3 (+)
  • untested on older devices but i presume it works since that version of xcode supports 3.1.3 (+)

my app does not use any latest features (at least im pretty sure), but all seems to work as far as i can tell. no need for new macbook, osx Lion etc, etc

hope someone with more experience can chime in as well, just thought id share because this appeared to be a concern for quite a few people, one form or another

hope it helps

-niko [import]uid: 34595 topic_id: 26670 reply_id: 326670[/import]

#2

Apple is effectively requiring Lion/Xcode 4.3 to develop for iOS moving forward.

Corona currently still works on Snow Leopard, but the writing is on the wall. And we can no longer really support people having build problems running less than Lion/Xcode 4.3. I will also tell you that we are not actively testing on Snow Leopard any more either. (In fact, you guys should be pushing us to test/fix Mountain Lion, not Snow Leopard.)

As for Corona requirements, 2006 is 6 years old. That is a long time for computers. While we support most of the Intel Macs right now, we are pushing the OpenGL graphics capabilities in very hard ways and a very small number of you (counted on 1 hand) with particularly old/bad video cards have reported glitches/bugs in the rendering. We can’t fix these because these are Apple or hardware bugs that require either an OS upgrade (driver fix) or new hardware. Corona’s graphics stuff may not be doing cool 3D, but the ability to support native display objects with OpenGL is actually a really hard problem and requires advanced video cards and lots of modern Apple and OpenGL APIs to make this work. (This is one reason you haven’t seen these features on Windows so far.)

Also, in the near future, we will be switching to 64-bit on Mac. Levels is already a 64-bit app, and MacApps and potentially Mountain Lion will require this. This will further restrict the systems we support, though it turns out the systems that don’t support 64-bit are the ones that don’t support the graphics requirements we need, so if you can run Corona now, probably nothing will change due to 64-bit.

Finally, for feature parity with IOS on the simulator and MacApps, plus meeting the requirements for Mac App Store publishing, there will be continuing pressure to embrace iOS APIs that are ported over to Mac. This means adopting/embracing Lion and Mountain Lion and may also lead to the eventual dropping of Snow Leopard.

This is the norm in the Apple world. Trust me on this because I’ve been doing this for many years. Don’t fight Apple or there will be a lot of pain inflicted on you. Go with flow.
Anyway, feel free to discuss how things can work on Snow Leopard/older Xcode’s, but I just want people to be aware that Apple moves rapidly and expects you to update your OS and everybody who wants to play in Apple’s playground is expected (beaten) to follow suit.
[import]uid: 7563 topic_id: 26670 reply_id: 108140[/import]