is going to hurt. Even with all the new graphics apps, there is still nothing out there to replace Canvas and I still use it regularly.
For me personally it's Quicken 2007. Quicken Essentials, while Intel, sucks so bad I can't bring myself to launch it anymore. And the various other money management programs out there aren't much better. Maybe I'm just used to Q2007 as I have customized reports that have become second nature to me. But I suppose I could just run the Windows version under Parallels 6. That will cost me some serious money as I would have to obtain a legal copy of full Windows.
Rosetta doesn't take up much space. I wonder why they can't just keep it available.
For me personally it's Quicken 2007. Quicken Essentials, while Intel, sucks so bad I can't bring myself to launch it anymore. And the various other money management programs out there aren't much better. Maybe I'm just used to Q2007 as I have customized reports that have become second nature to me. But I suppose I could just run the Windows version under Parallels 6. That will cost me some serious money as I would have to obtain a legal copy of full Windows.
Rosetta doesn't take up much space. I wonder why they can't just keep it available.
I suppose some newer versions of some programs are worse than older ones, but it's certainly not generally true.
Canvas, mentioned by Gary5, happens to be available in versions that work on Intel machines, and they're pretty good.
Sometimes, people just have to bite the bullet, and spend the money to upgrade.
I only have two programs I still use running in PowerPC mode: Quicken 2004 and Office 2004. Quicken 2004 is nice because I have ready access to 7 years of personal finances without converting data. Office 2004 is great because it was the last non-ribbon version of Office. Everything MS produced after Office 2004 was riddled with that crappy ribbon interface that took up way too much of my display.
Now with Lion these two programs must hit the road. Since most reviews panned Quicken Essentials for Mac, let's hope Intuit releases a good Quicken Mac version before Lion. I mean when the head of your company is sitting on Apple's Board of Directors you think the company (Intuit) would do a better job for Mac users.
Office is another problem. Nothing I would rather do than dump Office. But I manage a law office where we use Office 2004. Since lawyers are not the easiest people to change, a conversion to Pages may be difficult. However, it will be Pages or Office for Mac 2011. Both are a huge change for existing users of Office 2004. I have my fingers crossed that Pages will be more attractive for my legal associates.
I was about to post that I?ll have to keep a Snow Leopard machine around to play a few of my favorite older games.... but I?m looking at them all and to my surprise they?re all Intel-native or have been patched to become so:
Halo
UT 2004 (and the UTMods mod launcher)
World of Padman
Tranquility
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
GooBall
Pac the Max X
Penumbra: Overture
Battlestar Galactica Beyond the Red Line
Lego Mindstorms NXT (I think!)
These are all ?oldies" that I thought needed Rosetta... but I Get Info and they?re Universal after all The only game I like that needs Rosetta seems to be Swarm Racer. No biggie.
I only have two programs I still use running in PowerPC mode: Quicken 2004 and Office 2004. Quicken 2004 is nice because I have ready access to 7 years of personal finances without converting data. Office 2004 is great because it was the last non-ribbon version of Office. Everything MS produced after Office 2004 was riddled with that crappy ribbon interface that took up way too much of my display.
Now with Lion these two programs must hit the road. Since most reviews panned Quicken Essentials for Mac, let's hope Intuit releases a good Quicken Mac version before Lion. I mean when the head of your company is sitting on Apple's Board of Directors you think the company (Intuit) would do a better job for Mac users.
Office is another problem. Nothing I would rather do than dump Office. But I manage a law office where we use Office 2004. Since lawyers are not the easiest people to change, a conversion to Pages may be difficult. However, it will be Pages or Office for Mac 2011. Both are a huge change for existing users of Office 2004. I have my fingers crossed that Pages will be more attractive for my legal associates.
It's often difficult to move to something new. But one of the good things about Apple is that they drop backwards compatibility after a time. People should know that this will be happening, and prepare for it. MS has problems with Windows that are related to their fear of dropping this compatibility.
In order to move forward, we have to stop looking back. With computers, I always assume that sometime, something will be dropped. I live with it.
MS attempted to come out with Longhorn, with a number of new and more advanced technologies. One of the reasons it failed was because they couldn't do it without dropping some of that compatibility.
Front Row's been broken since iTunes 8. Good riddance.
It works fine for me. But there are alternatives.
As for Rosetta, unfortunately that means no Lion upgrade for me. At least not anytime soon. That $129 OS upgrade would result in costing me about $500 in new software. And one piece, Quicken, even though it's several years old, is still better than any of the alternatives out there, including the current version of Quicken.
It's often difficult to move to something new. But one of the good things about Apple is that they drop backwards compatibility after a time. People should know that this will be happening, and prepare for it. MS has problems with Windows that are related to their fear of dropping this compatibility.
In order to move forward, we have to stop looking back. With computers, I always assume that sometime, something will be dropped. I live with it.
MS attempted to come out with Longhorn, with a number of new and more advanced technologies. One of the reasons it failed was because they couldn't do it without dropping some of that compatibility.
Sometimes, we just gotta let go.
True, but sometimes it seems Apple does it purely out of spite. Was Rosetta in the previous builds of Lion? Was it working? Are there new changes to the Lion OS that makes it somehow inherently incompatible?
Apple make Rosetta so seamless that it's likely there are many people who don't know they are even using it. Java can be installed on your own. FrontRow nobody really used. I think ditching Rosetta is going to be a headache for Apple and their customers.
The last PPC Mac was sold in Fall of 2006. By the time Lion actually comes out, those machines will be nearly 5 years old. Support for machines older than that is typically dropped by Apple in that timeframe. The CDs and possibly early C2Ds will also be dropped. Typical.
All of this is inevitable. We complain about it all the time. We want our machines to last forever, but they don't and they can't.
What all of this really shows is how nice it would be if Apple just implemented some kind of virtual operating system box to run previous versions of OSX when a machine originally supported it. It should be simple. Allow SL to run inside Lion to run Rosetta apps or anything else Lion no longer supports. It would work for Tiger or Leopard, too.
Sure, that's when the last PPC hardware was sold. But when was the last PPC software was sold? When did Apple finally update all it's software to not use any PPC code? When was Office, and Quicken moved to Intel. There was a LOT of PPC software, including Apple's own, that was sold after the last PPC Mac was sold.
We are not talking about supporting the hardware. Who cares if Aperture 3 can run on a PPC Mac. We are talking about supporting the software that was sold not all that long ago. The one great thing about Macs, and I've been using them since 1987, is that even as the hardware faded into the past, the software kept working. I had software from 1989 that still ran fine and was fully functional running under Classic on OX up until Classic was abandoned only a couple of years ago. It worked for nearly 2 decades!
If Rosetta doesn't have some inherent incompatibility with Lion, it shouldn't be abandoned yet.
But on the positive for Apple, if they stick with this decision, it means I'll likely be purchasing a new laptop sooner than planned so I can ensure to have a machine that will run Snow Leopard.
Quicken 2007 ?*Has since been replaced by Quicken 2008, 2009 and 2010.
You lost a lot of Mac credibility points with that bonehead remark. Quicken 2007 was the last Mac version before the steaming pile of crap they call Quicken Essentials. You are right, that's not Apple's fault. But Apple should have an interest in making sure their customers are taken care of. They can't seem to get the Quicken CEO, who freakin' sits on Apple's board, to get off his ass and make a decent piece of software for Macs.
Rosetta is very clearly needed, very clearly. If they drop it, Lion adoption is going to slow down a lot.
Most businesses don't switch to a new OS until 10.x.5 ish in general, now they might even hold that off longer. Though most of the time we tend to find ways to let new hardware run on a older OS.
Non-fat file: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail is architecture: ppc
For Snow Leopoard being touted as "all intel binaries," you'd be surprised to realize how much junk ppc code Apple left in Snow Leopoard... many many many of the binaries are still fat for some reason. Even though this doesn't affect performance, they serve no purpose being there and take up space, so I hope they trimmed the fat in Lion.
Well, those of us who use Quicken 2006 or 2007 are in for a world of hurt. Those are the last "complete" versions of quicken available to us. Quicken essentials is a joke. 2006/2007 requires rosetta, and for some reason (laziness?) Quicken doesn't seem to be in much hurry to do a proper update.
I hope they don't drop Front Row. Sure, there are some minor issues with it, but we still use it extensively in our household to connect to our centralized media server and play video content. The iPad and iPhone can't do that (AirPlay is only half an implementation as far as I'm concerned).
The playroom/exercise room has an iMac where we use Front Row all the time, and we have an old MacBook Pro that floats around the house where it's needed. I pop open my MBP to use as a Front Row device while working on the Mac Mini in the den. And, every once in a while we fire up a projector in the backyard for the neighborhood kids -- having to search through file shares for a particular movie seems like a pain in the butt when we could just use Front Row.
is going to hurt. Even with all the new graphics apps, there is still nothing out there to replace Canvas and I still use it regularly.
Agreed! I pay my Adobe tax and have most of their stuff (Master Collection) but I can get work done FAST in Canvas, even with all its quirks and bugs. Hopefully, if enough of us make enough noise, ACDSee will change their mind and build Mac versions of this program again...
"There are few examples of Java desktop apps in the wild..."
Excuse me? Yes, few of the "cool" Mac apps are, but there are TONS of Java desktop apps, although (obviously) usually ones intended to be cross-platform. At the moment I'm using the Cisco VPN client (required to connect to my corporate LAN from off-campus), JGnash (personal finance manager), and the database component and other portions of Open/LibreOffice that depend on it. I think the VirtualBox GUI does, too, unless they switched to Qt, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. This is Java, we're talking about, not apps that depend on something truly obscure, like the Visual Basic 3.0 runtime.
In any case, it's a good thing there's a planned and easy solution for this problem--it's probably how it should have been done all along, similar to every other platform (you can tell that Apple hasn't cared much about their JVM since 10.4).
I only have two programs I still use running in PowerPC mode: Quicken 2004 and Office 2004. Quicken 2004 is nice because I have ready access to 7 years of personal finances without converting data. Office 2004 is great because it was the last non-ribbon version of Office. Everything MS produced after Office 2004 was riddled with that crappy ribbon interface that took up way too much of my display.
Now with Lion these two programs must hit the road. Since most reviews panned Quicken Essentials for Mac, let's hope Intuit releases a good Quicken Mac version before Lion. I mean when the head of your company is sitting on Apple's Board of Directors you think the company (Intuit) would do a better job for Mac users.
Office is another problem. Nothing I would rather do than dump Office. But I manage a law office where we use Office 2004. Since lawyers are not the easiest people to change, a conversion to Pages may be difficult. However, it will be Pages or Office for Mac 2011. Both are a huge change for existing users of Office 2004. I have my fingers crossed that Pages will be more attractive for my legal associates.
Well, pages is certainly cheaper than Office 2011 but Office 2011 does give you the option to hide the ribbon and work the 'old' way. Personally, I like the ribbon now that I've learned to use it. YMMV
I understand that for most applications there are versions available that do not require Rosetta, but many of us have reasons (or at least preferences) for wanting to use older versions of applications. However, there are some cases where you need to maintain at least periodic access to old applications. One example would be TurboTax 2005 and earlier. I may not need it very often, but I would like to have some way to continue using it if I upgrade to Lion or future version of the Mac OS. These older applications are not changing, so I am not looking for anything new from Rosetta--just keep it working.
I would prefer Apple to keep Rosetta as an optional installation with Lion, but I could live with keeping Snow Leopard + Rosetta running on a Parallels virtual machine. Progress is great, but sometimes there is still a need to be able to connect with the digital past to avoid the permanent loss of information.
Both Front Row and Rosetta are quite unnecessary. Nice to see Apple cleaning up and moving forward.
to whom? Last time I checked, people use computers. If you have essential software which depends on Rosetta and cannot be upgraded or replaced, you are S.O.L.
I for one already keep an old computer around to run OS9. Just for that.
My group develops cutting edge (server side) enterprise java applications. I could not do this nearly as efficiently without a Mac. I could not do this at all without Java on my Mac. My organization has a good dozen developers running $3,000 Macs because they are the perfect platform to for this high end enterprise development. 5 years ago, all those developers were running Solaris boxes. BECAUSE Apple's Java support has improved so much over the years, we were able to switch.
There are tens of thousands of companies like us.
Who cares???
I know where you're coming but you need not worry. Lion won't come pre-installed with java but you'll still be able to download it on your own. Apple hasn't abandoned java, they're just not maintaining it anymore, Oracle is.
Comments
is going to hurt. Even with all the new graphics apps, there is still nothing out there to replace Canvas and I still use it regularly.
For me personally it's Quicken 2007. Quicken Essentials, while Intel, sucks so bad I can't bring myself to launch it anymore. And the various other money management programs out there aren't much better. Maybe I'm just used to Q2007 as I have customized reports that have become second nature to me. But I suppose I could just run the Windows version under Parallels 6. That will cost me some serious money as I would have to obtain a legal copy of full Windows.
Rosetta doesn't take up much space. I wonder why they can't just keep it available.
Rosetta huh.. Finally have to get a native OSX app to running that old trustworthy epson scanner, it seems.
Won't Preview scan from that printer?
I think Quicken is the only PPC app I still use regularly. If only Intuit would get off their butts...
Same for me. I refuse to use the newer versions of Quicken.
I guess I'll finally have to switch to iBank or something else.
For me personally it's Quicken 2007. Quicken Essentials, while Intel, sucks so bad I can't bring myself to launch it anymore. And the various other money management programs out there aren't much better. Maybe I'm just used to Q2007 as I have customized reports that have become second nature to me. But I suppose I could just run the Windows version under Parallels 6. That will cost me some serious money as I would have to obtain a legal copy of full Windows.
Rosetta doesn't take up much space. I wonder why they can't just keep it available.
I suppose some newer versions of some programs are worse than older ones, but it's certainly not generally true.
Canvas, mentioned by Gary5, happens to be available in versions that work on Intel machines, and they're pretty good.
Sometimes, people just have to bite the bullet, and spend the money to upgrade.
I only have two programs I still use running in PowerPC mode: Quicken 2004 and Office 2004. Quicken 2004 is nice because I have ready access to 7 years of personal finances without converting data. Office 2004 is great because it was the last non-ribbon version of Office. Everything MS produced after Office 2004 was riddled with that crappy ribbon interface that took up way too much of my display.
Now with Lion these two programs must hit the road. Since most reviews panned Quicken Essentials for Mac, let's hope Intuit releases a good Quicken Mac version before Lion. I mean when the head of your company is sitting on Apple's Board of Directors you think the company (Intuit) would do a better job for Mac users.
Office is another problem. Nothing I would rather do than dump Office. But I manage a law office where we use Office 2004. Since lawyers are not the easiest people to change, a conversion to Pages may be difficult. However, it will be Pages or Office for Mac 2011. Both are a huge change for existing users of Office 2004. I have my fingers crossed that Pages will be more attractive for my legal associates.
Halo
UT 2004 (and the UTMods mod launcher)
World of Padman
Tranquility
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
GooBall
Pac the Max X
Penumbra: Overture
Battlestar Galactica Beyond the Red Line
Lego Mindstorms NXT (I think!)
These are all ?oldies" that I thought needed Rosetta... but I Get Info and they?re Universal after all
No Rosetta--this could be a problem!
I only have two programs I still use running in PowerPC mode: Quicken 2004 and Office 2004. Quicken 2004 is nice because I have ready access to 7 years of personal finances without converting data. Office 2004 is great because it was the last non-ribbon version of Office. Everything MS produced after Office 2004 was riddled with that crappy ribbon interface that took up way too much of my display.
Now with Lion these two programs must hit the road. Since most reviews panned Quicken Essentials for Mac, let's hope Intuit releases a good Quicken Mac version before Lion. I mean when the head of your company is sitting on Apple's Board of Directors you think the company (Intuit) would do a better job for Mac users.
Office is another problem. Nothing I would rather do than dump Office. But I manage a law office where we use Office 2004. Since lawyers are not the easiest people to change, a conversion to Pages may be difficult. However, it will be Pages or Office for Mac 2011. Both are a huge change for existing users of Office 2004. I have my fingers crossed that Pages will be more attractive for my legal associates.
It's often difficult to move to something new. But one of the good things about Apple is that they drop backwards compatibility after a time. People should know that this will be happening, and prepare for it. MS has problems with Windows that are related to their fear of dropping this compatibility.
In order to move forward, we have to stop looking back. With computers, I always assume that sometime, something will be dropped. I live with it.
MS attempted to come out with Longhorn, with a number of new and more advanced technologies. One of the reasons it failed was because they couldn't do it without dropping some of that compatibility.
Sometimes, we just gotta let go.
Front Row's been broken since iTunes 8. Good riddance.
It works fine for me. But there are alternatives.
As for Rosetta, unfortunately that means no Lion upgrade for me. At least not anytime soon. That $129 OS upgrade would result in costing me about $500 in new software. And one piece, Quicken, even though it's several years old, is still better than any of the alternatives out there, including the current version of Quicken.
It's often difficult to move to something new. But one of the good things about Apple is that they drop backwards compatibility after a time. People should know that this will be happening, and prepare for it. MS has problems with Windows that are related to their fear of dropping this compatibility.
In order to move forward, we have to stop looking back. With computers, I always assume that sometime, something will be dropped. I live with it.
MS attempted to come out with Longhorn, with a number of new and more advanced technologies. One of the reasons it failed was because they couldn't do it without dropping some of that compatibility.
Sometimes, we just gotta let go.
True, but sometimes it seems Apple does it purely out of spite. Was Rosetta in the previous builds of Lion? Was it working? Are there new changes to the Lion OS that makes it somehow inherently incompatible?
Apple make Rosetta so seamless that it's likely there are many people who don't know they are even using it. Java can be installed on your own. FrontRow nobody really used. I think ditching Rosetta is going to be a headache for Apple and their customers.
The last PPC Mac was sold in Fall of 2006. By the time Lion actually comes out, those machines will be nearly 5 years old. Support for machines older than that is typically dropped by Apple in that timeframe. The CDs and possibly early C2Ds will also be dropped. Typical.
All of this is inevitable. We complain about it all the time. We want our machines to last forever, but they don't and they can't.
What all of this really shows is how nice it would be if Apple just implemented some kind of virtual operating system box to run previous versions of OSX when a machine originally supported it. It should be simple. Allow SL to run inside Lion to run Rosetta apps or anything else Lion no longer supports. It would work for Tiger or Leopard, too.
Sure, that's when the last PPC hardware was sold. But when was the last PPC software was sold? When did Apple finally update all it's software to not use any PPC code? When was Office, and Quicken moved to Intel. There was a LOT of PPC software, including Apple's own, that was sold after the last PPC Mac was sold.
We are not talking about supporting the hardware. Who cares if Aperture 3 can run on a PPC Mac. We are talking about supporting the software that was sold not all that long ago. The one great thing about Macs, and I've been using them since 1987, is that even as the hardware faded into the past, the software kept working. I had software from 1989 that still ran fine and was fully functional running under Classic on OX up until Classic was abandoned only a couple of years ago. It worked for nearly 2 decades!
If Rosetta doesn't have some inherent incompatibility with Lion, it shouldn't be abandoned yet.
But on the positive for Apple, if they stick with this decision, it means I'll likely be purchasing a new laptop sooner than planned so I can ensure to have a machine that will run Snow Leopard.
Quicken 2007 ?*Has since been replaced by Quicken 2008, 2009 and 2010.
You lost a lot of Mac credibility points with that bonehead remark.
Rosetta is very clearly needed, very clearly. If they drop it, Lion adoption is going to slow down a lot.
Most businesses don't switch to a new OS until 10.x.5 ish in general, now they might even hold that off longer. Though most of the time we tend to find ways to let new hardware run on a older OS.
Dropping Rosetta makes me a little nervous. Is there currently an easy way to figure out what software I have on my Macs that needs Rosetta?
you can use
/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app
which has a column to indicate whether code in running binaries is intel or ppc
or
lipo in Terminal.app (cli)
% lipo -info /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
Non-fat file: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail is architecture: ppc
For Snow Leopoard being touted as "all intel binaries," you'd be surprised to realize how much junk ppc code Apple left in Snow Leopoard... many many many of the binaries are still fat for some reason. Even though this doesn't affect performance, they serve no purpose being there and take up space, so I hope they trimmed the fat in Lion.
The playroom/exercise room has an iMac where we use Front Row all the time, and we have an old MacBook Pro that floats around the house where it's needed. I pop open my MBP to use as a Front Row device while working on the Mac Mini in the den. And, every once in a while we fire up a projector in the backyard for the neighborhood kids -- having to search through file shares for a particular movie seems like a pain in the butt when we could just use Front Row.
Come on, Apple -- keep Front Row!
is going to hurt. Even with all the new graphics apps, there is still nothing out there to replace Canvas and I still use it regularly.
Agreed! I pay my Adobe tax and have most of their stuff (Master Collection) but I can get work done FAST in Canvas, even with all its quirks and bugs. Hopefully, if enough of us make enough noise, ACDSee will change their mind and build Mac versions of this program again...
Excuse me? Yes, few of the "cool" Mac apps are, but there are TONS of Java desktop apps, although (obviously) usually ones intended to be cross-platform. At the moment I'm using the Cisco VPN client (required to connect to my corporate LAN from off-campus), JGnash (personal finance manager), and the database component and other portions of Open/LibreOffice that depend on it. I think the VirtualBox GUI does, too, unless they switched to Qt, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. This is Java, we're talking about, not apps that depend on something truly obscure, like the Visual Basic 3.0 runtime.
In any case, it's a good thing there's a planned and easy solution for this problem--it's probably how it should have been done all along, similar to every other platform (you can tell that Apple hasn't cared much about their JVM since 10.4).
No Rosetta--this could be a problem!
I only have two programs I still use running in PowerPC mode: Quicken 2004 and Office 2004. Quicken 2004 is nice because I have ready access to 7 years of personal finances without converting data. Office 2004 is great because it was the last non-ribbon version of Office. Everything MS produced after Office 2004 was riddled with that crappy ribbon interface that took up way too much of my display.
Now with Lion these two programs must hit the road. Since most reviews panned Quicken Essentials for Mac, let's hope Intuit releases a good Quicken Mac version before Lion. I mean when the head of your company is sitting on Apple's Board of Directors you think the company (Intuit) would do a better job for Mac users.
Office is another problem. Nothing I would rather do than dump Office. But I manage a law office where we use Office 2004. Since lawyers are not the easiest people to change, a conversion to Pages may be difficult. However, it will be Pages or Office for Mac 2011. Both are a huge change for existing users of Office 2004. I have my fingers crossed that Pages will be more attractive for my legal associates.
Well, pages is certainly cheaper than Office 2011 but Office 2011 does give you the option to hide the ribbon and work the 'old' way. Personally, I like the ribbon now that I've learned to use it. YMMV
I would prefer Apple to keep Rosetta as an optional installation with Lion, but I could live with keeping Snow Leopard + Rosetta running on a Parallels virtual machine. Progress is great, but sometimes there is still a need to be able to connect with the digital past to avoid the permanent loss of information.
Good.
Both Front Row and Rosetta are quite unnecessary. Nice to see Apple cleaning up and moving forward.
to whom? Last time I checked, people use computers. If you have essential software which depends on Rosetta and cannot be upgraded or replaced, you are S.O.L.
I for one already keep an old computer around to run OS9. Just for that.
WHOA! Easy their chief.
My group develops cutting edge (server side) enterprise java applications. I could not do this nearly as efficiently without a Mac. I could not do this at all without Java on my Mac. My organization has a good dozen developers running $3,000 Macs because they are the perfect platform to for this high end enterprise development. 5 years ago, all those developers were running Solaris boxes. BECAUSE Apple's Java support has improved so much over the years, we were able to switch.
There are tens of thousands of companies like us.
Who cares???
I know where you're coming but you need not worry. Lion won't come pre-installed with java but you'll still be able to download it on your own. Apple hasn't abandoned java, they're just not maintaining it anymore, Oracle is.