Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Apple and Third-Party Developers

Apple, as the Leop­ard release approach­es, has cho­sen to take their cus­tom­ary approach with third-par­ty devel­op­ers and the Gold Mas­ter. Although ADC mem­bers have been pri­vate­ly (under NDA) beta-test­ing Leop­ard for months, work­ing to ensure appli­ca­tion com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and report­ing bugs, their final seed was released weeks ago. There have been leaked reports of many changes since the last seed to the Gold Mas­ter, and none of those changes are avail­able to be test­ed by third-par­ty devel­op­ers until the retail ver­sion of Leop­ard is available.

Third-par­ties can’t test their appli­ca­tions on the ship­ping ver­sion of Leop­ard until you and I, the reg­u­lar users, have our copies in-hand and start open­ing up those third-par­ty appli­ca­tions. It’s not only poor treat­ment by Apple of the devel­op­ers, but it’s poor treat­ment of cus­tomers as well. There is no guar­an­tee that the appli­ca­tions you’ve used on Tiger will work on Leop­ard, despite the best attempts by the third-par­ties to ensure that the apps will work.

It gets worse. Apple sends a copy of Leop­ard to ADC mem­bers, but it’s not a dig­i­tal copy, it’s by mail. So, ADC mem­bers have a choice: go to an Apple Store on Fri­day and drop 130 bucks to buy the OS they’ve been test­ing for months, or wait days or weeks for their free copy to show up, while pos­si­bly thou­sands of cus­tomers use bro­ken or non-func­tion­ing applications.

Not the best sit­u­a­tion for devel­op­ers or customers.