Living the Life -- Dave Batton

Recent Posts

Released!
Friday, June 6, 2008

The Registration User Interface
Saturday, May 17, 2008

Generating Unique Registration Numbers
Wednesday, May 7, 2008

My Product Registration Solution
Monday, March 10, 2008

Still Thinking About Product Registration
Friday, February 15, 2008

The Leopard Dilemma
Tuesday, August 14, 2007

iPhone Envy
Monday, August 13, 2007

C4 - Day 3
Sunday, August 12, 2007

C4 - Day 2
Saturday, August 11, 2007

C4 - Day 1
Friday, August 10, 2007

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.

Comments

I am in exactly the same boat as you. I have a hard enough time trying to absorb all the new material without throwing in a new variable. A lot of developers that I respect have suggested to go ahead with the latest and greatest and harness it's new power. I certainly would love to use a bunch of the obj-c 2.0 features. Some things I want to do, like taking a snapshot with the built in camera have become a piece of cake. So I do lean toward Leopard a lot.
But at the end of the day, the hardest hurdle for me to clear is Core Audio. I need to do a couple of things there and I find that bridging between Carbon and Cocoa get tricky FAST! So... if I start embracing Leopard I also find I isolate myself from the community, NDA and all... So for now I am trying to figure out Core Audio while still working on Tiger. Once I have that part figured out, I will then decide what to do next. Build the GUI in Tiger and get a wider audience (perhaps not cramming all possible feature in 1.0 and leaving room for improvement in an eventual Leopard only 2.0 release). Or... I can just start indulging Obj-C 2.0 now and figure... by the time I'm done with my app Leopard will probably be a mature technology. The big side benefit from that is using XCode 3 and XRay. The... last and still interesting posibility is to develop under Leopard wit the new shinny tools, but set compatibility with Tiger (I am not exactly sure how to do this but I am pretty sure it is possible).
Good luck to you Living the Life... I guess for the time being I will stick to "living the night life"

Posted by Jose Vazquez on August 19, 2007 11:14 AM

It's been a while since you wrote this comment. Have you made a decision? Has any thing changed in the way that you develop? What do you feel is your next major obstacle in releasing your product.

Posted by Mandaris on October 3, 2007 7:41 AM

I've decided to keep working with Tiger for now. That way I can continue to get support on the public forums, and not worry about whether a problem is mine or Apple's.

My project is about ready for release. Once Leopard hits the streets, I'll take a few weeks to "Leapordize" my project, then release it.

The next major hurdle is still figuring out how to handle the product registration. I was hoping that Wil Shipley would have something exciting for me to try, but apparently not. The email I sent them was returned as undeliverable. I guess I'll try to roll my own.

Posted by Dave Batton on October 3, 2007 8:28 AM

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