LandlordMax Mac Version Update
I wish I was able to say that the Mac Version of LandlordMax was ready to launch this weekend, but unfortunately I can’t. I’m still amazed how difficult it’s been to release a Mac version of LandlordMax. Much more than I anticipated!
Since I last wrote about it, we resolved our biggest issue. That is the software now has the ability to backup and transfer databases between both the Mac and Windows versions. What we’re struggling with right now is the obfuscated version of the deployed application. For those of you who don’t understand that last sentence, what it means is that as part of publicly releasing LandlordMax we take the generated program and scramble it to make it hard to reverse engineer. We don’t actually do it ourselves, we use another piece software who’s sole purpose is to obfuscate programs.
However when we do this it breaks something in the program. We’re still working through the details to figure it out. The worse part is that it only breaks the program for the Mac version, not the Windows version. So it’s something specific to the Mac. Once that’s resolved, we’ll of course need a bit of time to re-test and re-verify that everything works on the full-fledged and obfuscated version.
Something else, we’ve just confirmed that LandlordMax will not run on the latest Mac OS called Snow Leapord. As far as I can tell, supporting Snow Leapord is going to cost us a significant effort (anywhere from weeks to months). I won’t go into the details now, but it has to do with how Java is setup on the Mac OS. Needless to say, I’ve had to make some hard decisions over the last few days. The biggest one is that we’re going to go ahead and release the Mac version of LandlordMax without support for Snow Leapord. If you try to run LandlordMax on Snow Leapord you’ll get an error message saying that Snow Leapord isn’t yet supported. I just don’t feel it’s right to make everyone wait when most people haven’t yet upgraded to Snow Leapord.
Hopefully it won’t be long before I can post “LandlordMax Mac Version is NOW Available!”. I know I’m really looking forward to it!
· September 24th, 2009 · 12:52 am · Permalink
I’m surprised to hear that the program will not work on Mac OS X Snow Leopard as i have upgraded. I, therefore, assume that Landlord Max for the Mac will not be available until sometime next year. Could you give me some broad questimate what time in the year?
Thanks for your time and consideration.
· September 24th, 2009 · 11:08 am · Permalink
Hi Carl,
We’d love to offer Snow Leopard support right away, but unfortunately we can’t because of how Java (the engine on which LandlordMax is built) is supported on the Mac OS. In detail, before Snow Leopard the Mac OS really only offered support for Java 5. There was a Java 6 installation, but it wasn’t guaranteed on all versions of the Mac OS, and it was known to be “buggy”. So we’ve been working to make sure to support Java 5.
With Snow Leopard, the Mac OS now only offers Java 6. The Java 5 installation now points to Java 6. So although they are saying it’s Java 5 supported, it’s not. The Java 5 installation is just a pointer to Java 6. So there’s no continuity, you can’t run the same version on Snow Leopard as all the other Mac OS versions!!! And as far as I understand, they have no plans to upgrade the Java version on the older Mac OS’s. What that means is that we have to support two versions of LandlordMax.
As much as we’d like to say Java 5 and 6 are the same, there are some significant differences. Enough that it’s a significant effort. Not only that, but there are several components within LandlordMax which may not work as expected with Java 6 (we still have a lot of testing to do), so we may have some additional versionning issues. Basically it’s not a small effort.
Therefore because of this, we’ve decided to go ahead and release the Mac version of LandlordMax for the Java 5 Mac OS’s (all Mac OS’s except Snow Leopard). We’re then going to start working on getting LandlordMax to work as expected with Java 6, all the while trying not to break the Java 5 version.
Which means that the Mac version of LandlordMax for all Mac OS’s except Snow Leopard will be out any day now. The Mac version for Snow Leopard will be out sometime later. I can’t give you an estimate as we don’t yet fully know what all the impacts are of working with Java 6. It’s also not just working with Java 6, but the Mac version of Java 6 and the Windows version of Java 6 are different (only the Mac OS has a different version of Java – Linux, Windows, Unix, etc. all use the same Java engine, just the Mac’s is different).
As I mentioned, we don’t yet know how long this will take, I do suspect it will take some time. Definitely more than weeks, it will very likely be in terms of months. Had the Mac OS done a continuous transition from Java 5 to Java 6, we wouldn’t be facing this issue. But they decided to make a hard break between versions, which I suspect is to save a bit of money (remember it’s the only operating system with a custom Java implementation). If you Google for this issue, you’ll find a lot of people complaining about software no longer working, software companies complaining about large upgrade efforts, etc. I can even post some of the better links if you’d like. Basically some people have been hit pretty hard.
· October 1st, 2009 · 11:10 am · Permalink
Do you have a date yet for the Apple version? Looking forward to it and decided not to upgrade due to LandlordMax. Will just keep last years Mac for your software and get newer Apple computer for other programs. thanks
· October 1st, 2009 · 7:51 pm · Permalink
Hi Todd,
It’s our policy not to officially (publicly) set release dates as we’ve found it causes more harm than good. For example, too many companies locked into dates will often push their software out the door when it isn’t quite ready. What this means is that you end up with lower quality software, and even then they often still delay it. Rather than go this route, we prefer to release when it’s ready. We still have a lot of internal pressure, but by going this route it allows us to delay the release of a version of LandlordMax if we don’t feel 100% confident in it. This is also why you don’t see bugs in LandlordMax!!
I’m sorry we’re the reason you’re holding back to upgrading for Leopard. Hopefully it won’t be too long until we’re able to offer a Leopard version.
· January 17th, 2011 · 11:10 am · Permalink
I found this blog with a search on Quicken trying to find whether LLM can import a Quicken 2005 .qrp file. A person searching for information for LLM on a Mac could easily find this too. My point concerns the lacking Mac information.
The last response for this blog is dated 10/1/09 and left the door open for even when a mac os x Leopard program would be or is available. Suggestion: finalize this blog with a dated, current status and even include the status of applicability, if any, to the Snow Leopard.
Speaking of the Snow Leopard, since I saw the download link for a Mac OS X, with no other defining/restrictive information I downloaded same. I have the most current on this date Mac OS X 10.6.6. The download completed, yet without doing significant work, have little reason to believe from this blog whether LLM supports Snow Leopard.
Suggestion: make the information crystal clear on your website Home page just exactly which operating systems LLM does support and also on the Download page – not just for the Mac, but also for Windows. I couldn’t learn anywhere that I looked which versions of Windows LLM supports either.
· January 23rd, 2011 · 12:43 am · Permalink
Hi Robert,
Firstly thank you very much for the suggestions.
To be quite honest I don’t think I’m up for updating all the old posts on my blog (there are over 404 of them as I’m writing this!). I have about 6 years of history on this blog, and a good number of them are LandlordMax related. So to go back and update each old post as new information comes to light is a daunting task, getting worse by the year…
For example, this post alone is about a year and a half old. And as you’ve already seen, things have changed quite a bit since. At some point I have to rely on people looking at the dates because there’s just too many articles for me to try and update. Also it’s pretty common for bloggers to leave old articles as is because it’s pretty much like magazines, they can’t be updated either.
For Snow Leopard, yes we definitely support it. For which versions of Windows and the Mac we support, it’s pretty much everything that’s been released since and including Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5.
If you go to the company website (https://www.LandlordMax.com) it shows that it support the Mac OS. As well on the user manual it states Mac OS X 10.5 or higher: https://www.landlordmax.com/support/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=2 It’s not as central as you suggested, but the jist is that we pretty much support every semi current version of Mac and Windows (that Apple and Microsoft still continue to support).