(2012-07-27, 07:09)ethangar Wrote: As a dev, I hop on using the beta versions of the OS. Why? Because my users will be trying to use my software on day 1 of the new OS. I, at the very least, want to know what issues they'll encounter. One of the best ways to know about these issues is to be dogfooding on the new operating system. Ideally, I'd be a step ahead of them and have it working on day one of the new OS release. Far, far more of the issues are caused by intentional design changes rather than bugs in the OS, so I think waiting "years" to upgrade your main OS is the wrong attitude to take.
Just some thoughts on this:
XBMC isn't a typical application on a computer. With XBMC you don't have the pressing need to update to the latest and greatest OS for XBMC to run at its full potential. XBMC isn't using any of the new APIs or features of 10.8, so upgrading a Mac OS X powered media center to 10.8 will make very little difference to XBMC (at least on paper and in the past. We'll see how ML goes.) It's one thing for a computer that is a normal every-day machine that people use and check e-mail and play games on. Changes to Expose, AirPlay mirroring, notifications, all that is appealing on a normal computer. For a media center computer, it doesn't make a lot of difference. Most of our users are using XBMC on a dedicated XBMC computer.
In the corporate world, you will not see companies updating their OS the day the OS comes out. They know that the update will cause issues with their specialized software, company specific work flows, employee training, etc. It's not uncommon for them to wait a year or two before updating. Same with other pro-users such as video editors and photographers. If you buy a few thousand dollars worth of applications, you might wait a month or so to hear if the updated OS plays nicely with them, as your job depends on those applications working.
Considering that, according to SDKs and various other things, we know XBMC should work just fine on a newer version of Mac OS X, the only thing to anticipate are bugs. Since this OS update is happening during the middle of XBMC's development cycle, where it will be months before a stable version is released, time really isn't a pressing factor for our devs. Our devs might not use the newest OS on a day to day basis on their main machines, but they do test things out and fix bugs when they come up, just like they've done in the past.
