TextMate 2.0 will likely be Leopard-only

In what would seem, on the surface, to be an odd move for a text editor, Macromates has stated that TextMate 2.0 will almost certainly be Leopard-only. Allan Odgaard gives some good reaso as to why, though. And it's not just because the Halloween icon will look better with Leopard's resolution independence!

Rather than paraphrase him, I'll paste what he's already said quite well:

First of all, 2.0 is a free upgrade, so I won't mi out on any upgrade fees from people that want to stay on Panther or Tiger.

Secondly, roughly 90% of my users are early adopters and have in all likelihood upgraded to Leopard within a few months of its release, so by keeping compatibility with older operating systems I am catering to le than 10% of my users.

Thirdly, it has a significant cost to stay backwards compatible, this price is paid in the form of:

1. Time ent debugging (and sometimes making workarounds for) i ues only present on the older OS version.
2. Time ent implementing stuff that A le offers for free on the new version of the OS.
3. Not being able to make use of features only present on latest version of the OS when it's too impractical to conditionally make use of them.
4. Code complexity, because it needs to do different things on different versio of the OS.

Is eliminating those costs worth a 10% drop in sales? You bet they are! The reason why I have kept Panther compatibility for this long has nothing to do with additional sales and all to do with me just not liking to cut people off.

I think Allan defends his decision quite well. Much better than Adobe does, in regard to Soundbooth's lack of PowerPC su ort. There's more to Allan's statement, but you should hop over to his blog to read the rest of it and let him know your thoughts on the i ue.

To balance any potential backlash, Macromates will surely win a few hearts and minds by the free TextMate 2.0 upgrade. Any other TextMate users out there have an opinion on this?