The Granny Factor
Hi,
I'm a developer and i don't own a Mac, but i presume many here do, and at this point, i could really use your advice.
We are porting a fat client app (Windows only) for a customer to be able to run it off of a server, but don't have the luxury of keeping it confined to an intranet, since employees need to be able to access it via a secure login while traveling.
And that means we have no control over what machines the web client runs on.
One of those machines could very well be an older Mac, that's received only minimal maintenance, if any at all.
Quite frankly, i have no idea of what Apple's update/support cycle is, and would i need to worry about working around old Safari 2.0 bugs or not.
The customer seems to have a couple of "Grannies" working on their staff, so the challenge is to make it work flawlessly, because those are a pain to deal with.
Let's for the sake of this conversation assume that Granny bought a white iBook in '04 and it's been working without fail
What should i expect to find in terms of software?
Thanks in advance, any help is appreciated.
Dan
P.S. One of the guys on our team has an iPhone, so we've pretty much got that part covered
I'm a developer and i don't own a Mac, but i presume many here do, and at this point, i could really use your advice.
We are porting a fat client app (Windows only) for a customer to be able to run it off of a server, but don't have the luxury of keeping it confined to an intranet, since employees need to be able to access it via a secure login while traveling.
And that means we have no control over what machines the web client runs on.
One of those machines could very well be an older Mac, that's received only minimal maintenance, if any at all.
Quite frankly, i have no idea of what Apple's update/support cycle is, and would i need to worry about working around old Safari 2.0 bugs or not.
The customer seems to have a couple of "Grannies" working on their staff, so the challenge is to make it work flawlessly, because those are a pain to deal with.
Let's for the sake of this conversation assume that Granny bought a white iBook in '04 and it's been working without fail
What should i expect to find in terms of software?
Thanks in advance, any help is appreciated.
Dan
P.S. One of the guys on our team has an iPhone, so we've pretty much got that part covered
Comments
I would think it would be a major mistake to insure that your software is compatible with system software that old. Perhaps a more prudent approach would be to insure compatibility with 10.5 and then do what's necessary to get the oldest client hardware up to date and functioning with that OS X release. Apple made enough changes to the underlying OS that compatibility with old system software should be left behind by application developers.
Hope that helps in some small way.
Hi,
I'm a developer and i don't own a Mac, but i presume many here do, and at this point, i could really use your advice.
We are porting a fat client app (Windows only) for a customer to be able to run it off of a server, but don't have the luxury of keeping it confined to an intranet, since employees need to be able to access it via a secure login while traveling.
And that means we have no control over what machines the web client runs on.
One of those machines could very well be an older Mac, that's received only minimal maintenance, if any at all.
Quite frankly, i have no idea of what Apple's update/support cycle is, and would i need to worry about working around old Safari 2.0 bugs or not.
The customer seems to have a couple of "Grannies" working on their staff, so the challenge is to make it work flawlessly, because those are a pain to deal with.
Let's for the sake of this conversation assume that Granny bought a white iBook in '04 and it's been working without fail
What should i expect to find in terms of software?
Thanks in advance, any help is appreciated.
Dan
P.S. One of the guys on our team has an iPhone, so we've pretty much got that part covered
First things first: if you need to build software for a machine, you need to know what OS, and what version number, that machine is running. So, go and find out! Then come back with that information to get answers.
It's been a really busy time for us, so i couldn't get back to this right away.
I do agree with your logic, hundred percent. It would be much easier for us to ignore the early versions of Safari and build for the future. That's the ideal way to go, anyway. Webkit back then was not quite the treat it is today.
And it seems that we will be able to do both, that, AND avoid having to provide support for those who refuse to upgrade.
It seems that with its 19MB download (universal binary?), the latest version of Firefox will still run on Jaguar. I'll still have to verify this, but they definitely don't mention a cut-off point, unlike for some of the other browsers.
All we'll have to do at this point is urge those users to upgrade to Firefox, and have them rediscover the web
Luckily for us it also updates automatically... a real help when dealing with users who hold onto stuff until it fails hard.
Thanks again!
Dan
First things first: if you need to build software for a machine, you need to know what OS, and what version number, that machine is running. So, go and find out! Then come back with that information to get answers.
It's Web based...
We have no control over what machine the user has.
We could go on and on, even supporting Internet Explorer 5 if we wanted to. Every browser version has its bugs. But do we want to? No
But it's hit and miss if you want to know if the hours put into making things work are even necessary, and whether a certain browser still exists on some machine. Because if something goes wrong, the user will blame us and not the browser vendor.
And I'd actually hoped that Safari 2.0 were gone completely
Dan
Support IE7+, FireFox, HTML4+. That should suffice imo. Webkit based browsers are plenty and they are quite standards compliant.
And we do so already, it's just that up until about 3.0, Safari has had bugs that required somewhat ugly workarounds. And those are DOM/Javascript bugs. CSS support on the other hand is nearly perfect.
Some little bugs still have to be fixed though, and as we've noticed, have actually been inherited by Google Chrome.
By the way, the Webkit team took a while to implement the DesignMode module, which allows for Rich Text editors such as TinyMce. Webkit of today is not the same as Webkit of yesterday. But to be fair, that "yesterday" would end sometime in mid '07, since 3.0 was released.
Dan
P.S. I'd just noticed how color temperature on the iPhone is a lot closer to natural daylight. It's just so much easier on the eyes! Our Windows machines on the other hand have an icy blue tint to them... I don't know about the others, but I'm definitly going to calibrate my screen, once I find some good software