Do you know which OS your customers are using?  Both Panic and The Omni Group do.  I think this information is important, if not a curiosity regarding the state of the Mac OS.  It is astounding to me that people are still using Mac OS X 10.3.  As a struggling college student I didn’t upgrade my hardware often, in fact, I’ve never owned a G3 Mac nor a G5 Mac.  However, I always kept my OS up to date.  I’ve made it a policy here at Pariahware to support the current OS and the previous OS for desktop operating systems.  As of this writing, for the Macintosh that means OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.5 (Leopard).  For Windows that means Windows 7 and Vista.

When one is developing software, it is important to decide what platforms will be supported.  Sometimes the requirements placed on software are only placed there for support reasons.  Other times the requirements are there because of dependencies.  For example, one of Pariahware’s products, Doc Merge, requires Word 2008 on Macintosh and Word 2007 on Windows.  Why? Because the scripting functionality for Mac won’t work on the previous version, and the other scripting for Windows will throw errors if 2007 isn’t installed.  Even though some people didn’t meet the system requirements, they were trying anyway, not that I blame them.  But, the error reporting mechanism we use would give us strange errors telling us that requirements weren’t being met.  Now, if the user is doing this willingly, no problem.  However, if the user was unwittingly installing the software it looked bad for Pariahware.

To alleviate this problem, in the latest version, I added some checks to Doc Merge at start up.  So, on OS X it checks to make sure that the OS is 10.5 or 10.6.  It also checks to make sure that Word 2008 is installed on the system.  If either of these doesn’t qualify, the user is told with an apology which requirement has not been met and the application quits.  For Windows, the application checks to see if the user is running Vista or 7, then it checks the registry for Word 2007.  Again, if one doesn’t meet the requirements a similar dialog is displayed.  While this may seem draconian to some, the error reports for the latest version have quit coming in. To me, that shows an improved user experience, and in turn, shows an improved quality in the product.  Another one of Pariahware’s products is File Stitcher.  On Windows, a check was added to see if QuickTime had been installed because File Stitcher required it.  Since iTunes is ubiquitous it is rare to find a Windows system without QuickTime, but it can happen.  Macs come with QuickTime so it is not an issue.

To sum things up, if one is developing a product with certain requirements for reasons other than support, add checks to your applications to improve your user’s experience with your product.

Pariahware, Programming