Addressix and Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)

We started work on Addressix on 18 October 2001. Mac OS X 10.1 had just come out. At the time, many people were still using Mac OS 9 (or even 8.6), so we wanted to use the Carbon toolbox, which allowed an app to run on both Mac OS and Mac OS X. At the time, the Metrowerks compiler was the choice of most developers. And Metrowerks PowerPlant was the best framework to create Mac applications. So we chose those technologies, and were able to release version 1.0 on 13 December 2001.

We had to update Addressix for Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and made updates to take advantages of new features such as the search field (part of 10.3). In general though, the application just worked, even as Apple switched CPUs from PowerPC to Intel. Addressix was not a Cocoa app, so reworking it to be an Intel app would have been a lot of work, and didn’t give users any benefits. So we didn’t.

But then came Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). Addressix was a PowerPC application since its creation, and depended on the Rosetta compatibility layer on Intel Macs. Apple removed this in Lion, dropping support for Addressix and many other older applications that were working perfectly well.

We use Addressix ourselves, so we looked into converting compilers from Metrowerks to Xcode, updating PowerPlant to support the Intel processor, and getting updated versions of third party libraries. Ironically, this might have been practical 5 years ago, with an older version of Xcode, but technology has marched on. We had no luck.

If you have access to a machine that runs Mac OS X 10.6 or earlier, Addressix should work fine, and we will continue to support it. But there will be no new updates.

Thank you all for your support of Addressix over the last ten years or so. We’re truly sorry we can’t keep it running with Apple’s latest software.

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