The rapid pace of Apple's hardware and software development poses a challenge for developers. They can either stay in the past, supporting legacy hardware and operating systems - and get left behind by Apple; or they can adopt Apple's new technologies, delivering superlative performance and usability for enthusiastic Mac customers.
For CrystalDiffract 6, we've chosen the latter approach: championing the state-of-the-art design that is the modern Mac. Sadly, that means we can no longer support older operating systems.
The Mac OS represents a tightly-integrated eco-system, and the only way to develop genuine Mac software (as opposed to the dreadful kinds of emulation, third-party hacks, shells, Java, and other ugliness) is to be a part of that. This does then impose limitations on backwards compatibility:
Apple's current development tools simply do not support older systems. For example, the Mac development environment, Xcode, ships only with tools for OS X 10.8 and later. We have managed to stretch backwards compatibility to OS X 10.7, but that's as far as we can go...
Apple's advanced memory-handling technology, "ARC", simply does not work on anything older!
We know that most Mac users are enthusiastic Apple supporters, and will want to move with the times and stay up-to-date with the great new software and hardware features that Apple is providing. Please don't get left behind: upgrade your Mac (you can upgrade to the latest macOS for free!) and take advantage of the fantastic new features and performance of CrystalDiffract 6 running on the world's best operating system.
See Also