No love for us the PowerPC folks..
So yesterday Apple announced the SDK to develop apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch. After several months of jailbreaking/hacking your iPhone/iPod Touch, you will now be able to officially obtain apps to run on these devices in a legal manner.
Should your geek-intellectual level not be up to par, an SDK (short for Software Development Kit) its the tool given to programmers so they can develop applications/games for a given platform. Having an SDK means that you can whip out some apps, debug them, tweak them, publish them. In short, having an SDK its a good thing for any technology platform that wants to go places.
Curious and bored, I wanted to download this famous SDK thing to mainly just play with it. Hey that’s what us geeks do for fun..sometimes. Anyhow, so I went to developer.apple.com and I was ready to get a hold of this thing, when it hit me.Reading the system requirements on the page, the SDK only works on intel macs. But what about us PowerPC folks? We apparently aren’t getting any love anymore from Apple. Perhaps its just this initial release of the SDK, and they will be making a PowerPC/Universal Binary version? Truth be told, I really doubt it..
Oh well, I guess its time for me to start looking for a way to get rid of my old macs and get an intel Mac. It was only a matter of time, until us PowerPC users started to get the short end of the stick. That’s technology for you, danm you Moore’s law.
Filed by sebaz at March 8th, 2008 under Computers, Mac, Technology
I know the feeling. Like you know, my main system is still my 12″ Powebook G4. I’ve noticed that Apple slowly but surely starts releasing software that lacks functionality, or in this case, total support for aging systems.
Up until this point the only obvious software that has lacked support for the PowerPC processor (to my knowledge) is the new iMovie (I think that’s the one at least). But this SDK being supported exclusively on the Intel architecture makes no sense to me. All xcode compilers are universal so I don’t see the need to make this SDK (essentially just code) to be Intel only.
Maybe someone reading this with more knowledge on the subject can give us a reason or a clue for this.
Personally, I wanted to give the SDK a shot (even though I don’t own an iPod touch or iPhone.) I don’t plan to upgrade my system until late this year or early next year, so I guess working on the SDK will be out of my hands for now.
Comment by tony — March 10, 2008 @ 10:37 am