FROM THE IGLOO

We’re asked this question all the time, every time a new OS version is poised for release: will Product X work on the new OS?

OFFICIAL ANSWER:

1. We do not make any products publicly available with support for an OS until no earlier than one week prior to the OS’s official release date.
2. At this time, we anticipate that all of our currently shipping Macintosh products will be available for Snow Leopard on approximately the same date that Snow Leopard ships.
3. We may or may not have a private beta available for a particular product prior to the date that Snow Leopard ships.

MORE DETAILED ANSWER:

The above is all true and correct, but the reasons for it can be slightly complicated. First of all, there is no publicly available “beta” or “RC” release of Snow Leopard available. Therefore, we are covered by NDA when talking about specifics. Therefore, I can’t talk about specifics. I can say that the biggest challenge will be related to the builds of Snow Leopard that are made available to us (and other developers) and the timing of them.

We don’t release products until they have undergone a complete QA cycle, which can take up to a full week. Therefore, even if we had DFM working internally on a Snow Leopard developer “beta”, there is no guarantee that the final Snow Leopard won’t break DFM. This means that we need to test again on the final version and hope that no new issues come up. If they do, they will need to be fixed immediately. Because we need approximately one week for a full QA cycle, we need to get the final Snow Leopard approximately one week before its release if we want to have a simultaneous official release. This may or may not happen, but we will do our best. The worst case scenario is that we will have our own “beta” or “RC” release to coincide with the Snow Leopard launch.

We are in a different situation than many other developers when it comes to OS changes, particularly for the DF line. Because of what DFM is and what it does, it operates at a very low level in the OS and is more “sensitive” to core OS changes than other products might be. DFM is not like a word processor app (or whatever product you want to think of) where incompatibility with the OS might result in broken features or occasional crashes of the app.  A badly functioning or incompatible DFM could cause fairly catastrophic failure, so we have to get it right and ensure complete compatibility.

This is why when you try to install the current version of DFM on Snow Leopard, you will be blocked by  a message stating that DFM only works on OS X 10.3 – 10.5. We had no way of knowing when the current version was released whether it would work on a future OS, so we block you from potentially screwing yourself up.