Louis Kessler, developer of Behold, a Windows genealogy application, brings up an interesting issue about the future of genealogy software development for Windows – namely, should developers still be supporting Windows 98. Other genealogy software developers have had a few issues crop up with Windows 98.
Louis writes:
…which makes me think: How many people out there are hanging onto Windows 98? Should I continue developing Behold for it? Microsoft is pulling their support of Windows 98 after this summer. So should I continue support for Windows 98 into the future or not?
You can discuss this with him and others in this Behold Discussion Forum thread.
It’s a very gray area – Windows 98 is creeping up on 10 years old, and when you look at the other major genealogy software community – the Apple/Mac community (not that Linux doesn’t have a genealogy software development community – they do have an active one and it’s growing, but they aren’t facing the issues that Windows and Mac developers are facing), they are facing a very interesting situation: With the release of the new Intel Macs, Mac software developers are going to have to drop “classic” support – from here on out, unless a third party does something or Apple does something, Mac developers will have to move to 100% Mac OS X only, rather than supporting Mac OS 9. Mac OS X applications that aren’t written to support Intel can still be run on the Intel Macs under some kind of emulation layer, but anything beyond that won’t run. In the past, you could run Mac OS 9 stuff under Mac OS X.
I may pop over to the discussion, because it is an interesting question – after all, any PC bought in the past several years is going to have some form of Windows XP or Windows 2000, and I think many genealogists that are running Windows would have been feeling pressure to move up, not from the demands of genealogy software, but from the demands of things related to genealogy – photo/multimedia editing, etc.