The Leopard Dilemma

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

I finally installed the Leopard Developer Preview I picked up at WWDC. It’s on an external drive—I didn’t replace my primary Tiger OS. I’m not that much of a thrill-seeker.

The Cocoa product I’m working on isn’t going to be ready for a couple of months yet, so I’ve decided I’ll make it a Leopard-only product and use all of the cool new Leopard technologies.

I’ve heard some rumors that Leopard isn’t solid yet. I don’t expect it to be, since it is a beta release. My problem is that I’m still pretty new to Cocoa, and I run into problems all the time that I eventually track down to my own programming mistakes. Working on Tiger, I know that if something doesn’t work, I screwed up. But if I upgrade my development environment to Leopard, I won’t know if a problem is due to my error, or a bug in Leopard.

Granted, almost all of the problems will continue to be with my code. But I won’t know this for sure until I get the problem fixed. If I can’t get it fixed, I still won’t know if the problem is with my code or Leopard. How many hours should I spend trying to track down a bug that might not be mine?

So for now, I’m continuing to do my product development in Tiger. I think I’ll make the switch and start developing with Leopard in October.

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