Very disappointed that Lion is causing major problems with disable students assistive software in the UK. Software suppliers are not issuing patches/upgrades until 2012. Totally unacceptable attitude from Apple in ignoring disabled customers

If I'm reading you correctly you're saying that third party products are having problems under LION and that those providers are not expecting to issue patches for their software until 2012?

I'm not so sure why you're blaming Apple for this, rather than the explicit providers of the software you require - shouldn't you be pressuring them to respond and update their software? I mean Apple won't issue patches to fix other people's software will they?

There is a long development cylce for operating system updates, and software companies have access to this development cycle. That's what the program is for - to allow development/update of software for the new operating system.

I'm not quite sure what you're expecting Apple to do here...?

Apologies if I've misunderstood your point.

I'm a member of the Apple Developer Program, and to be fair to Apple they have made the Lion development cycle very open.

As for the removal of Rosetta - that's there entirely to support apps from the previous generation PowerPC, as you say - architecture previous to summer 2006 (roughly). The app providers, if they want to continue supporting OSX, have to move to Intel at some point - is 5 years long enough to do that?

I don't believe Lion is 'unstable' - sure there's problems with any new releases of OS platforms.

I'm not sure what Apple could do here to help you unfortunately.

the software suppliers in question have had a number of difficulties in updating their software due to Lion presenting them with an unstable platform (their words)

So, the developer whose software isn't working is telling you it's Apple's fault that they haven't managed to update yet? That's an excuse, and not a very good one. If I were you, I'd start looking for a replacement for any software made by those developers ASAP. They should have started working on this a long time ago, and need to take responsibility.

this being componded by Lion removing the Rosetta code

That's another excuse. Developers have known that Rosetta was going away for a long time.

My disappointment is that Apple seems to have a poor relationship in their development cycle with software suppliers. (Shades of MS and Windows)

I would suggest that you don't make judgements about Apple based on what one developer is telling you. Especially when that developer is one whose product is not working for you and who is looking for a way to avoid losing you as a customer.

What's wrong with Office 2011? Works just fine on Lion. Or do you mean the previous incarnation of Office that relied on Rosetta?

It seems your issue is that the suppliers you're dealing with are relying on Rosetta? Given that Rosetta is an old provision for backwards compatibility for machines build prior to August 2006, I can't see how you can state this is Apple's fault.

The removal of Rosetta from Lion was common knowledge on the Lion dev forums since its inception.

I'm sorry, but your suppliers need to up their game, rather than Apple slow down development 🙂

I guess then that the 15 or so application developers/suppliers must all be at fault ? (including office 2011)

There's nothing wrong with Office 2011 in Lion, and I'm sure there are way more than 15 developers out there who have failed to update their software properly. That doesn't mean it's Apple's fault that those developers didn't update their own software.

In the mean time we have decided to revert all new Apple kit back to Snow leopard. At least this way UK students with disabilities can stiil have the support they need.

That is certainly quite reasonable. I'd advise you, though, to seek alternatives in case the updates promised "in 2012" by the developers of the software you're referring to never appear. My wife's business waited for a long time for an update for Now Up-to-Date for Windows, which never worked quite right in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Now Software is now out of business, with no update ever delivered. (Now Software was a pretty well-respected developer, too.) They have been forced to switch to something else for their scheduling needs.

Also, note that if you can manage to get Snow Leopard installed on new machines currently being sold, that will not continue for long. At some point very soon, new machines will be introduced, and Snow Leopard will not have the appropriate hardware support for them. So downgrading to SL is a purely temporary solution.

Office 2011 & Office 2008 work and are supported on Lion, try re-installing.

thirdmatefromgreat yarmouth wrote:

No doubt this will give 'whoever' time to get their professional act together.

Speaking of getting one's professional act together I would take a look in the mirror if I were you. A professional responsible for maintaining the computer equipment and network of a school system would certainly perform extensive testing of any new operating system upgrade before deploying it. Even the smallest corporations don't just upgrade software willy-nilly. If you had thought to set up a test system and verified what software worked and what didn't before deploying Lion to the entire system you would have been protecting your students from these issues. A professional would have discovered these issues and delayed deployment of Lion until the patches you mention were available. But you didn't and now you are trying to deflect blame from yourself and your staff. And you dare to accuse Apple of incompetence. I call hypocrisy.

lkrupp wrote:

thirdmatefromgreat yarmouth wrote:

No doubt this will give 'whoever' time to get their professional act together.

Speaking of getting one's professional act together I would take look in the mirror if I were you. A professional responsible for maintaining the computer equipment and network of a school system would certainly perform extensive testing of any new operating system upgrade before deploying it.

snip

I totally agree with that point but as displayed on this board over the last 2 weeks all kinds of IT 'professionals' took the leap without even a glance at where they were going, most of them ended up here whining about Apple.

Csound1 wrote:

lkrupp wrote:

thirdmatefromgreat yarmouth wrote:

No doubt this will give 'whoever' time to get their professional act together.

Speaking of getting one's professional act together I would take look in the mirror if I were you. A professional responsible for maintaining the computer equipment and network of a school system would certainly perform extensive testing of any new operating system upgrade before deploying it.

snip

I totally agree with that point but as displayed on this board over the last 2 weeks all kinds of IT 'professionals' took the leap without even a glance at where they were going, most of them ended up here whining about Apple.

When anyone starts a conversation by annoucing they are a professional this or that alarm bells immediately go off in my head and I have to supress a snicker. I learned a long time ago that when you are 100% positive you are right it usually turns out to be the opposite. I have enough egg on my face from years of being wrong about something I was absolutely positive about (troubleshooting telecom equipment) that I always hedge my bets and am never "positive" about what the trouble is.

🙂

All my professional events happen in front of an audience, makes for good troubleshooting discipline and a reluctance to upgrade until I know it works.

But I'm not an IT 'Professional', merely a tech.

Speaking of getting one's professional act together I would take a look in the mirror if I were you. A professional responsible for maintaining the computer equipment and network of a school system would certainly perform extensive testing of any new operating system upgrade before deploying it.

True enough, I would say there's more to the issue though. I mean corp Win desktops you have the option of which OS to deploy on new kit right? If your apps aren't compatible with Win7, you can roll back to Vista or even XP under the same licensing terms.

That's not possible with the newer Apple machines - they won't run Snow Leopard due to lack of support. I.e. you can't roll-back to SL or Leopard.

So when you use Apple for business purposes, and you have certain apps that don't run on the current release - you're limited on purchasing new machines aren't you?

As for the 'professional' bit - there's obviously differing levels of professionals 🙂 I mean a taxi driver earns his living by driving, arguably he's a professional driver. But he's probably not a Schumach

All I did was state that Apple seems to have forgotten or is not aware about the potential impact of Lion on disabled students in the UK and both apple and the assistive software suppliers failed to act together over this omission.

This is really the bit people are disagreeing with. I don't think Apple forgot anything at all in this instance - I suspect it's your software suppliers are just way behind the curve in requiring Rosetta.

Like I say, the dev program from Apple is pretty good, and quite advanced. If you develop & sell apps for the platform and don't use the development forums & environments make available....well there's no one to blame but those suppliers unfortunately 🙂