Developers: Quick Get “Retina-Ready” Or Risk Abandonment | Hacker News Reader

Developers: Quick Get “Retina-Ready” Or Risk Abandonment

techcrunch.com

14 pointsmrkmcknz12 comments

Apple's done a couple of really bad things here:

1) Developers who build without XCode 4.3.1 and iOS 5.1 SDK cannot leverage the retina display, even if they embed hi-res images in their app.

2) In order to use XCode 4.3.1 and iOS 5.1 SDK, you MUST be running OSX Lion. You can not install it on Snow Leopard. This is bad - Apple has always supported "up to two versions back" but now, for a minor version release, has abandoned support for an OS that is still 'current'. Mountain Lion isn't released yet, and hence Lion and Snow Leopard and the last two versions.

What this means is developers who need to update their apps have to first buy OSX Lion (many have been legitimately holding off because it's pretty crappy, overall). This is specially worse for developers who build OSX and iOS apps - upgrading an OS and expecting your apps to "just work" isn't practical. I was just waiting to skip to Mountain Lion directly, but this forces me to pay Apple, test on and use Lion for a few months even though I don't want to.

Forcing developers to upgrade their OS just to support a .1 SDK update is a cheap, non-classy move by Apple.

The web welcomes you with open arms.

Hah, when the web makes up their mind about standardizing on stuff like HTML5 Audio I'll accept. Until then, I'm fucked either ways. :)

The web still has too many arms on one side and too few on the other. I accept the web as a desired direction, but I know this feeling is a religio-political one and not based on practicality, at least for developers who would like to be paid for their software.

As a fellow iOS developer I feel your pain - I've been dreading the forced move to Lion since Lion's release. I haven't researched this yet but a possible solution would be to install Lion and Xcode on a VM? Then you could update the OS as frequently as you liked and not have to worry about it breaking the rest of your workflow/implementing "features" like Automatic Termination (my main reason for avoiding Lion).

I'm following http://stackoverflow.com/a/9728951/106095, and it seems like it might work. But yes, I'm glad Apple's EULA now finally allows VMs.

...or on a new partition / external hard drive.

Apple has not always supported two versions back. It has usually been the case that the latest version of Xcode requires the latest version of OS X. See Xcode 2.0, Xcode 3.0, Xcode 3.2, Xcode 4.0. Xcode 4.2 was an aberration.

As far as my stats go, around 85% of programmers that use Macs are using Lion. I imagine for Mac and iOS developers specifically it's well over 90%.

> I imagine for Mac and iOS developers specifically it's well over 90%.

This is kind of a circular argument though. I updated to Lion only because it was clear for a long time that Xcode 4.3 would be Lion-only.

The system works!

I'm sorry, but this title is too ridiculous to pass without comment. Consider the source.

Or, really, just test with 5.1 and fix the frickin' bugs. My wife reports a number of her games have stopped working. Not sure whose fault it is - Apple is secretive and developers are lazy - but these transitions are always rocky for her.

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