All Good Things Must Come to an End
It is our policy to support the current and previous versions of OS X in any given release. For example, Cornerstone versions 1.0-1.1 supported 10.4 Tiger & 10.5 Leopard, while 2.0-2.2 supported 10.5 Leopard & 10.6 Snow Leopard.
1.5 and 2.5 were exceptions to this rule. Both were released on the cusp of a new Mac OS X version and provided simultaneous support for three versions of OS X: 10.4-10.6 with 1.5 and 10.5-10.7 with 2.5.
We believe that this policy represents a good compromise between supporting older operating system versions and simultaneously allowing us to migrate to newer tools and keep Cornerstone up-to-date. Unfortunately, it can’t be achieved without leaving something behind.
So, now that 10.7 Lion is here we will be making the next step by dropping support for 10.5 Leopard in the next 2.x update. As a consequence, we will also be dropping support for Macs with PowerPC processors.
We believe that very few Cornerstone users will be impacted by this change. Currently less than 3% of visitors to zennaware.com are running 10.5 Leopard and we think this number will decrease very rapidly as 10.7 Lion is adopted (already almost 30% of visitors are running 10.7 Lion).
However, we do understand that some users will continue to need a version of Cornerstone that runs on 10.5 Leopard. For this reason we will be making 2.5.x available for download from the Cornerstone support page, in the same way as we do with 1.5.
We will continue to support Leopard with 2.5.x maintenance updates up until the release of the next 2.x update.
Future versions of Cornerstone will be Intel-only and will be better for it — removing the PowerPC code means smaller downloads and potentially faster launch times — but we can’t help feeling a little nostalgic.
Leaving the PowerPC behind marks the end of an era.
So long PPC. So long Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.