Are there certain features in RW8 that make it a must-have upgrade over RW7?

RapidWeaver Classic
8

I don’t think I’m the right guy to ask about features of RW8 – I’ll let the Realmac guys speak for their own software.

But, as far as plug-ins go, I think there are some good reason to move to RW8.

Missing features

Speaking about features: we have to drop a bunch of little ones like Dark-Mode and some bigger features, like Image Stacks, and everything else that touches RapidWeaver resources.

For me personally, that’s plenty. Knowing that you’re missing out on those things and any stacks that rely of those things would do it for me.

Impedance matching

But I think the larger reason is that I strongly encourage people to use technology from the same time period. Mixing and matching some things released recently with RW7 (last built on the Mac OS X 10.13 sdk from 2017) is probably not great.

All the add-on developers are going to do the bulk of their testing with the latest versions of things.

End of the Road

And there will be real limitations. Eventually there will be some part of your environment that will not work with RW7. That time is coming soon with YourHead plugins, like Stacks.

So, maybe it’s not quite the end of the road, but you can see it from here. :eyes: LOL.

But why?

I currently run tests on RW7.5 through RW8.7 (and working towards RW9 currently). And for macOS, I test from macOS 10.12 - macOS 10.15 and macOS 11. Three specific versions of RW and 5 specific versions of macOS – or a matrix of 15 targets. Adding Apple Silicon (universal) adds another dimension to the matrix and it’s just too many. Maintaining so many targets is very time consuming. In order to keep things sane, I’ll be dropping RW 7 support when I add Apple Silicon universal builds.

To summarize…

Bad news:

  • Stacks v4.2 will drop RapidWeaver 7 support.
  • When? Beta testing starts later this week.

Good news:

  • Does RW7 still work? Yes.
    I’m just no longer guaranteeing that it will keep working.
  • How long will it keep working? Months?
    I can’t say for sure. I will keep it working as long as I can. But RW8 and RW9 get priority from this point on. If adding features for RW8/9 breaks RW7 then that will be the real end of the road.
  • So what actually changed? Not much.
    Mostly, I’m just taking the “RapidWeaver 7 Compatible” off of the website. At least for now. The real change is that I’m no longer making any guarantees. When something eventually does break RW7, that will be that.
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