Over at the TextMate blog, Allan has announced that TextMate 2.0 will require OS X Leopard. While I don’t really consider this much of an issue (after all, Leopard is going to make many cool features possible), a lot of people are having issues with it. For my part, I’ll be upgrading to Leopard as soon as possible but I know that’s not possible for everyone. Some people are still running Panther.
Allan has a good list of reasons supporting his decision:
- Time spent debugging (and sometimes making workarounds for) issues only present on the older OS version.
- Time spent implementing stuff that Apple offers for free on the new version of the OS.
- Not being able to make use of features only present on latest version of the OS when it’s too impractical to conditionally make use of them.
- Code complexity, because it needs to do different things on different versions of the OS.
Allan feels these benefits far outweigh any decrease in the customer-base, and I guess he’d know best about that. Still, there are those aren’t too happy with the decision:
I like my Mac but I don’t give a damn about Apple and their stupid codenames and incremental upgrades. I won’t switch from Panther to Leopard just for the sake of giving you another 39 €.
Funny, considering that TextMate 2.0 will be a free upgrade.
