Just wanted to give you a quick heads-up, the RapidWeaver 7 system requirements have changed to 10.11 or greater.
We’ve done this for many reasons, including speed & performance. Also, RW7 had a whole bunch of issues under 10.10 that we can’t justify the time to fix (there’s some big things that aren’t trivial). Our stats also show a very small % of users are still on 10.10.
And finally, OS X 10.12 is just around the corner and we don’t want to be supporting 3 generations. We’re keen to keep moving fast and improving RapidWeaver, hence the need to draw a line in the sand.
We’ll be giving RapidWeaver users a heads-up and encouraging anyone who hasn’t upgrade to 10.11 do so asap in prep for the RW 7 launch.
When developing Stacks 3 I was faced with this same sort of thing. RW6 demands 10.9 support and I (mostly) try to follow suit. But I really wanted to have several bits of UI that supported Vibrancy (translucent views) – and that requires 10.10.
It’s really really really hard to develop for the cutting edge while trying to plan some fallback compatibility. You end up jumping from machine to machine to try to test every little thing. And with UI stuff (like Vibrancy) a lot wasn’t (at the time) able to be tested via automatic Xcode Bots on various OS’s and hardware.
So…
I started using http://www.deploymateapp.com . It does static checking of all the APIs in your code and will tell you what targets your code will run on, what it will require, and which APIs are depreciated.
Basically it made it possible to plan ahead a bit instead of getting the shock at the end of the development.
At the end of the day, I still launched the private beta for the devs without 10.9 support – because there were a few bits missing. And I’ve had some hiccups – but the tool definitely has eased the pain to a small fraction of what it used to be.
If you run Stacks 3 in 10.9 you can see that the vibrant views correctly become opaque – and the scrollbars adjust correctly, and the toolbars shift the content to the right spots. Kind of a pain – but it was nice to support all of the RW users and get Vibrancy too.
Great tool. Highly recommended!
On the news: 10.9, 10.10, and 10.11 all run on the same hardware. And updates are free now. There’s hardly an excuse to run an older version. I’ve seen stats showing really solid uptake for the new versions.
Still – would have been nice to launch with 2 versions supported. I suspect a few will grumble. And it’s always nice to be able to ovoid grumbling when not too painful.