Snow Leopard

Good morning, Kineme.net listeners :)

Today's a pretty exciting day -- the veil and mystery behind Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) finally clears.

To ensure that things stay nice and orderly, I'd like to take a moment to lay out some goals, plans, and procedures.

First things first, our apps and plugins:

Many of our plugins work on Snow Leopard (especially if you're running the latest betas). There are some known issues that we're working on, and no doubt there are many unknown issues waiting to be discovered. Truth be told, we were planning on having another month of development time to clean up any loose ends, but alas, the release date moved ahead while our hands were tied up with other projects.

QuartzBuilder and QuartzCrystal should continue to work without any issues. Kineme3D's latest beta should work, and we have a clean up release lined up for the next couple days to keep things running smoothly. PerformanceInspector does not work -- we're working on that (Internally, iterators were heavily modified, and that trips up PerformanceInspector's profiling engine).

Free plugin-wise, it's a mixed bag. We have an updated GLTools release scheduled for the next couple days, and an updated KinemeCore release scheduled for the next couple days as well. If you find any problems with other plugins, please let us know so we can inspect/update them as necessary.

Next up, our goals:

Many things have changed in QC-Snow Leopard. We're still learning new details ourselves when it comes to QC's unofficial API, and how we can get our plugins to take advantage of new internal features. We've streamlined this process pretty heavily from the Tiger and Leopard days, so hopefully it won't be as error-prone as it has been in the past. That said, we're still human, and we make mistakes :/

We are still committed to QC development, though the face of QC is changing rather rapidly. Many functions we've introduced have been obsoleted, and we fully endorse using Apple's sanctioned means to accomplish things where possible. This puts us in a precarious position where we need to phase out development and support of some projects, and actively spend time seeking new frontiers to push the limits of what QC can do. We wish to serve the QC community as a whole, but do understand that we do not have the resources to maintain all of our plugins for all platforms indefinitely.

Last up, some procedures.

With so many things changing, and with so many kineme users now, we absolutely need an orderly way to handle problems. Please please please search for bugs before submitting them. We spend a slowly-increasing amount of time on duplicate bug reports, and that's likely to jump severely as everyone experiences the same problems with the Snow Leopard transition. When filing a report, you must absolutely include a Crash Log, a Composition demonstrating the problem, and any relevant output from Console.app. We'll try to provide instructions on how to do this, and we'll try to enhance KinemeCore's crash reporter to collect this information automatically as well in a future release to make your life easier. Please also include as much information as you can, even if you're just guessing. And finally, listen to our responses and provide feedback - knowing how various tests affect a bug can help us track down and fix issues significantly.

We may end up asking for commissioned projects more frequently - our business hasn't been completely unaffected by the global economy. Please don't presume us to be getting complacent or greedy; it's simply a fact of life that we need to eat/pay rent/buy-new-software-and-hardware from time to time.

Here's wishing to everyone a fun and successful Snow Leopard transition (and new machine upgrade, where necessary) - we can't wait to see what new and exciting things QCers everywhere are able to pull off :)