Don't leave out those who put you on map - before fix config

Thanks for your comments and concerns. I'll do my best to address them here.

First, please, know that it was a long and hard decision for me to move forward from 10.4/10.5 to 10.5/10.6 support -- literally weeks of reading as well as talking to several Mac developers, both over the net as well as in person. I have not bridged an OS upgrade that necessitated dropping a previous version before, and am doing so in the best interest of being able to continue development.

For me, the main reason is the need to maintain an alternate hardware and software platform -- I'm currently working on an Intel, 64-bit machine running 10.6. It is hardware that cannot run 10.4. Supporting 10.4 requires a second machine (a PowerPC G4 PowerBook) for testing purposes. In addition, I am able to run a virtualized 10.5 environment via VMWare which allows me to test both 10.6 and 10.5 support without rebooting, let alone changing computers.

Secondarily, I am moving to a minimum of 10.5 for technical reasons. There are new APIs available to developers in 10.5 that are now nearly two years old, yet I have been unable to take advantage of them. Following a practice of supporting (current OS version & current OS version - 1) seems to be a fair way to reward customers who are keeping up to date with Apple's latest offerings (performance enhancements such as Grand Central Dispatch and 64-bit support; data model enhancements such as automatic migration when changing the app's data structure, as new features sometimes require; UI enhancements such as Core Animation; and background process scheduling enhancements such as NSOperation) while still leaving a couple years' worth of wiggle room for those who have not upgraded yet.

Thirdly, Meerkat is dependent on a half-dozen open source or otherwise freely available software libraries which occasionally get patched for bug fixes or OS compatibility reasons. Maintaining compatibility back to 10.4 is often dropped in these projects for similar reasons.

You need to finish 10.4 version for paid users, before jumping forward. At this point it is like using a demo with the amount of clicks to get a dropped tunnel to reconnect. It should be doing this on its own as others have mentioned, but at least get the reconnect all in one place in the menu bar.

I don't mean to pick nits, but each stable release of my products is intended to be used as-is. Though it may not contain all the features that I, or my users, would like at that moment, implicit in purchase is the fact that What You See Is What You Get.

That said, in our email exchanges, you expressed a valid reason for staying on 10.4 -- that the hardware that you are using only goes up to 10.4. I similarly expressed the notion that I was considering dropping 10.4 support after 10.6's release.

To reiterate what I said in my blog post, I will continue to support the last version to run on 10.4 for some time in the future, probably until 10.7's release. But I can't commit to further development, be it new features (such as auto-reconnect) or bug fixes that hamper the functionality advertised in that version's original feature set.

Specific to auto-reconnect, this is honestly a feature set that I did not anticipate in the original vision for Meerkat, as very few of the many tunnels that I use regularly have connection problems. But as time has gone on and more users have weighed in, I definitely see the value in it. I just don't see Meerkat as "broken" or "incomplete" without it; rather, just an existing feature set that could, as is always the case with software, perform better in certain specific situations.

Lastly, and I mean this in no way as a dismissal of your concerns, but should you wish a refund of the purchase price of Meerkat, I am happy to provide you with one.

I hope that clears up where I am coming from.