Saying "bye bye power pc"

More then 3 years passed since apple moved on intel cpu's, time to say bye bye power pc.
I cant spend days for support platform, which now officially not supported even by vendor.
Guys who still on power pc, i can understand many issues, but it too much worthless time for me.
From now i'm going to build viewers for intel platform only.

http://hyangreflections.blogspot.com/2009/12/bye-bye-power-pc.html

uhhh... so I'm guessing you build viewers or something? I guess we're supposed to know who you are?

Hyang is who builds the OS X binaries for Cool and Emerald viewers.

I knew and I don't have a Mac.

well, next release i will build as universal too, but doubt i can support power pc more.

There are still quite a number of people on PPC, many on Mac Mini 1st gen. Guess that is still the Panther folks or early Tiger. Not an expert on this. But similar to WinXP that should still be supported.

I'm not sure about the technical capabilities and if it's possible to compile compatible versions, but I certainly will try to get at least a 1.19 viewer working. That will take a bit of time, a new netbook version for Windows and Linux first. Then cross your fingers .

For PPC owners who want contingency plans, I did try a build of the current Snowglobe trunk over the holiday and it still builds on Tiger with an oldish Xcode, with a few hurdles:

- Make sure your default is GCC 4, sudo gcc_select 4.0 will take care of that.

- /usr/bin/python will be 2.3 on Tiger, swap in something more modern. The stock 2.6 from python.org seems to slot in fine.

- Snowglobe uses a library called jsoncpp for its translation support, and the LL-built copy downloaded automatically may give you a nasty-looking link error. Grab the sources from Sourceforge, add -mlongcall to CCFLAGS in the linux-gcc section of the Sconstruct file, build, rename the resulting libjson_linux-gcc-4.0.1_libmt.a to libjson_mac-universal-gcc_libmt.a and replace.

- The gstreamer plugin won't want to build, but you won't need it, so go ahead delete it from your Xcode project and carry on as if you never saw it.

- SL will take a looooong time to build on an older machine, set it off at bedtime so you won't have to watch.

As a practical matter, how many PowerPC Macs out there are really capable of running the 1.23 viewer at anything close to a satisfactory pace?

With atmospheric shaders enabled, none of them. Without atmospheric shaders, only the very last iMacs and G5s.

Is there really any point in compiling a viewer almost no one can use?

I,m gutted to here that your not building viewers for ppc mac Hyang Zhao,i have been using the ppc emerald for a while now(up to 950).
the feature set in emerald is so much better than the LL viewer that it made SL tolerable for me.
i appreciate the work you have done in the past and can understand you dropping it for the future.

I cant see me going back to the LL viewer when the 950 emerald is no longer usable,so hopefully someone else will do a PPC compatible viewer with the emerald features that i like.

I had heard a lot of recommendations for Emerald and was going to try it,
but I'm on a G5 (which runs SL and Photoshop at the same time just fine btw).

I have both a G5 and the last Powerbook Pro model. The G5 (and even a silverdoor G4) run Emerald just fine.
The Powerbook runs it as well- albeit my settings have to be dialed back a bit, but still a perfectly viable machine.
Hell, I can even have a good time with Sparkle IM.

Just for kicks - who can appreciate a group like us? I mean, there has to be some consideration in context to our personality. Would you rather promote use by a 13 year old dutch boy with a brand-new Asus who loves bling and 'sploders - or the REAL freaks who lurk in Motorola silicon...

have fun people!