On 13 Dec 2003 at 16:03, Darcy James Argue wrote: > As for dropping support for old software, this is just an unfortunate > fact of life, but this situation has been long before OS X was > introduced. Most OS 6 apps wouldn't run in OS 8, many OS 7 apps > wouldn't run in OS 9, etc. Finale was an exception simply because its > Mac code was so woefully out of date -- and we've seen the problems > *that* has caused. > > [And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is true to a certain > extent -- perhaps not as much -- on the other side of the aisle? Does > WinXP run every piece of Win95 software flawlessly? How about Win 3.1 > software? What about DOS support?]
Basically, Microsoft has backwards compatibility down. I have clients who are using Access 2.0 (from 1992-94), which is a Win16 app written for Windows 3.x, and running it just fine on Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I have another client who has a dBase II application written for him in 1983 (i.e., DOS; indeed, very *early* DOS), and it has been running on every version of Windows this client has had, from Win3.x, to Win95, to Win2K, and now WinXP. There were a couple of issues on WinXP with printing from a DOS app, but that was handled by adjustments to the configuration of the printer driver and works fine. So, based on what you've said, I would say that Apple has *not* done nearly as good a job as Microsoft with backwards compatibility. Now, this is certainly not to say that there are no programs that fail to run or that have features that don't work on newer versions of Windows. But Microsoft made the migration path *very* clear, way back in the early 90s with the release of the Win32 API. Companies like WordPerfect that didn't follow the rules for the Windows APIs had problems, such as what happened when people tried to run WordPerfect 6.x (Win16) on Win95. It worked, but there were problems with certain widgets that WordPerfect had not programmed in standard ways -- their nonstandard approach worked fine in Win3.x, but it broke in Win95. Likewise, people who programmed against Win95-specific features that were not part of Win32 have had problems in NT-based versions of Windows. Also, programs that are not NT security aware have had problems. But those are design flaws that should be pretty easily rectified. Finale was a little problematic, though. Coda was, I think, at least a year or two late on getting out a version of Finale that ran on NT 4. It took them a couple of versions to get it right -- WinFin97 was the first 32-bit Finale, but it ran on NT 4 with no MIDI support; this was partly a problem with NT, not entirely Coda's fault, but it was solved by other programmers long before Coda solved it. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
