My license expires in March of 09. I will definitely be moving on to a developer that really wants to support the Mac platform. The only reason I became an early adopter was because I have always been throughly impressed with their PC support. That isn't the case for the Mac. Even the free PC app gets more updates than the PAID Mac version. How very sad
Hallo,
man, of course we _want_ to support Mac Platform, but also try to understand this:
- on PC world, there was no _quadruple_ CPU switch as on Mac. it's simply 386 for ages, and still is. No big endianity, no align sensitivity,
standard ABI, mature C++ support, rich system resources, mature development tools and so on. what was written in the past, still works (usually).
- Avast was developed exclusively for the x86 architecture (and is tied to x86 like hell), so the number of fixes/modifications to get it work correctly
on different CPUS (note - the virus database is the same as for Win, so
the updates come as often as for Windows, have you noticed?) is about ~4000 particular changes/workarounds, and the number still increases as new pieces of code come in. One of them missing or poked away -> non-deterministic behavior, malformed unpack, missing detection, sigfault, sigbus, crash. I try hard to have the engine 100% binary compatible and 100% correct for both PowerPC/x86 machines (or do you want that "Daemon died" somewhere during disc scan?), but this involves many hours between long-term tests, gdb, crashdumps, debug printouts and MacOS's oddities.
Thus, when we're able to issue stable and polished releases for Win (where those low-level problems don't exist) let's say 3 times per year, i think it's still good to have new version for mac 99%-ready now, one year after the first release, with many improvements.
But sorry for this moaning, and back to gdb...
regards,
pc
