Indie App development supporting PowerPC - Tiger or Leopard?

[AphoticD]

As much as I hate to admit it, Tiger is dying and it's just not usable for real purposes today. Software support is just too bad.

I understand where you are coming from. When it comes to web browsing, if a PowerPC Mac is too slow to run TFF, then Tiger has no other reliable options.

It would be great to see continued development of TenFourKit, but it’s unlikely to happen. As we’ve discovered, even the Leopard WebKit folks are losing ground. The latest 603.x release had a download counter on SF within the 3000 range. This is a worldwide download count for a quality, free to use product... ouch.

It’s not that Tiger is dying, most would have considered it dead once Lion 10.7 hit. The only reason why we're feeling this pinch with Tiger is because of the limited browsing options for using websites like Youtube and Facebook. Tiger as an OS is the same as it was almost 10 years ago (10.4.11 was released November 14, 2007), so it all comes down to the web developers and their limited scope.

Most modern web developers (and app developers for that matter) don’t seem to care if their product is bloated or slow on old hardware. As far as they seem to be concerned, optimization is a thing of the past. Just look at the shift in mentality of something as deep rooted as the use of image compression. Most web devs don’t seem to mind pushing out multiple megabytes of images per page load nowadays. I recall when I was actively building websites for a living (2005-2011) there was an etiquette about keeping page load sizes down under 400k (total, including images). Now you're lucky if a basic page load is less than 3MB. Even the MacRumors home page pulled down a total of 6.48MB once I scrolled to the bottom and all of the on-demand images loaded.

Google on the other hand have had some bloating on their landing page, but still keep it under a megabyte at 987KB. Which is still pretty heavy considering it's just a search box!

Do you think there's a way to turn off Core Image? I hope so. It's a resource hog which my 12" G4 doesn't like, especially with its skimpy soldered GPU. Some people would probably agree with me.

It's not really something you can turn off, it's more of a technology made available to the system and apps. I highlighted in a separate thread that the PB12" does ALL of it's Core Image rendering on the CPU by design and only uses the GPU for Quartz Extreme (Hardware accelerated window compositing). Individual apps can choose to target the GPU on this model, but it must be done from the developer's position and isn't made available as an option to the end-user...

I believe it would hinder window management performance, but you could try turning off Quartz Extreme using the QuartzDebug developer tool. Many developers used a check for QE, which confirmed OpenGL acceleration to determine if CoreImage was accelerated and could then choose to deliver CI-enabled content or not. This might result in some apps appearing to run quicker, but with fewer visual features.

Just checked Wikipedia, Sawtooths actually do have a 350 MHz version.

I just thought that since Yikes! was the first version of the PMG4, and 350 MHz is such a low speed for a G4, it might have been the Yikes!.

Rational thinking hiccup.

Yes, I made the same assumption when I saw the MHz rating, then I noticed it had an AGP slot. I wrote a whole thread on this...

I enjoy seeing low-spec hardware operating efficiently. To be honest, the 350Mhz G4 running Tiger with enough RAM, a capable GPU and a fast enough boot volume actually feels like a decent machine. For productivity purposes, you'd hardly notice it was under 1Ghz. It's just when you try loading up a web browser that you are reminded of the specs.

 

[bobesch]

Another suggestion for a software fork: the "BassJump" software for PowerBook G4 ...
The BassJump2 Subwoofer is one of my most used gadgets while sitting at any of my intel MacBooks (my daily companion became the MBP4,1 with silver-keyboard) for enhancing the music-experience with only little means. Unfortunately their software does do only support intel machines...

 

[Lastic]

Yup OpenSSL is available via Macports.

I'll also have a look, have a school degree in Programming 23 years , mainly Assembler and C and bash scripting altough I've been playing around in Python and Perl. Biggest lack is Object-Oriented programming which became the norm when I quit school and started working.

First hurdle , where did you find the source-code ?
[edit found it ]
svn co https://svn.cyberduck.io/tags/release-x-y(-z)

I found that 5.2 looks like the first stable version connecting to Dropbox and 4.3.1 seems to be the last PowerPC version.

[edit 2]
Java found, knowledge inexistant wont'be much of a help here but will poke around

@AphoticD I had another look at CyberDuck as a prep for the Winter Challenge.

It looks like Dropbox was already introduced in version 4.0 until 4.2.1 , afterwards it was removed again until 5.2 where it was reintroduced.

I did a svn checkout of the 4.0 version but it fails to pull in a dependency called rococoa which no longer seems to exist on it's googledrive location.

I then tried with 5.2 source , I installed ant and mvn from the Apache website but it falls over the Java 1.7 version since it needs 1.8 .
I tried to trick the pom.xml Maven build file by changing the source and targets to 1.7 but then the depencies fail in another plugin with Bad version in .class file.

Thinking of just installing the versions where Dropbox was introduced , I found 4.0 and 4.2.1 here
http://mac.filehorse.com/download-cyberduck/2372/old-versions/page-6/

but when using them there is no DropBox in either of them.

Oh well back to BitBar which gives me a headache because Xcode PPC cannot use the Macports gcc which supports +std=c11 , I thought of compiling it on Xcode 3.1.13 Intel or using this https://github.com/devernay/xcodelegacy
to use the PPC SDK in a more recent Intel Xcode .

 

[AphoticD]

Rococoa source looks to be at https://github.com/iterate-ch/rococoa

"Rococoa is a generic Java binding to the Mac Objective-C object system. It allows the creation and use of Objective-C objects in Java, and the implementation of Objective-C interfaces in Java." I have a feeling this will be integral for Cyberduck as much of it appears to be Java based.

Also, I haven't tried this, but there are instructions at http://skurganov.blogspot.com.au/ for supplying a more recent version of GCC (4.4) to Xcode 3.2.4 (Snow Leopard). This might work for Xcode 3.1.4 (Leopard) and later versions of GCC as well.

 

[Lastic]

Rococoa source looks to be at https://github.com/iterate-ch/rococoa

"Rococoa is a generic Java binding to the Mac Objective-C object system. It allows the creation and use of Objective-C objects in Java, and the implementation of Objective-C interfaces in Java." I have a feeling this will be integral for Cyberduck as much of it appears to be Java based.

Also, I haven't tried this, but there are instructions at http://skurganov.blogspot.com.au/ for supplying a more recent version of GCC (4.4) to Xcode 3.2.4 (Snow Leopard). This might work for Xcode 3.1.4 (Leopard) and later versions of GCC as well.

Will have a look later-on, I'm now fighting with xcode-build since it will allow me to give the correct GCC options to build BitBar 1.4 .

I already tried the above link but still failed so I'm now trying this one :

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19061966/how-to-use-a-recent-gcc-with-xcode-5#19442587

 

[Lastic]

Will have a look later-on, I'm now fighting with xcode-build since it will allow me to give the correct GCC options to build BitBar 1.4 .

I already tried the above link but still failed so I'm now trying this one :

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19061966/how-to-use-a-recent-gcc-with-xcode-5#19442587

This seems to work but the -objective-c parameter goes to com.apple.compiler.gcc.4.8 which seems to know nothing of Objective-C since it doesn't recognise NSString as a type and stuff, I don't know anyb Obj-C but that does look like a valid type to me, on hold for now ...

 

[AphoticD]

This seems to work but the -objective-c parameter goes to co.apple.compiler.gcc.4.8 which seems to know nothing of Objective-C since it doesn't recognise NSString as a type and stuff, I don't know anyb Obj-C but that does look like a valid type to me, on hold for now ...

hmm.. be sure <Foundation/Foundation.h> header is being included, this will bring in NSObject and most of it's non-UI sub-classes.

 

[skinniezinho]

Any chance to put a "Cyberduck"-fork into your focus ...?

That would be awesome and useful!
Owncloud ppc version would be nice also.