It's July, 2009 and we are still supporting a operating system (Win2000) that Microsoft doesn't even support. Within the next year Windows XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft as well. Time Monitor currently supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and will soon officially support Windows 7. The questions regarding operating system support is this: Can we continue improving and adding new features to our product so that is still runs on all the supported platforms? Does supporting an operating system released over 9 years ago affect our ability to take advantage of the newer OS releases?

To implement new features of the latest operating system we need to make sure it doesn't impact the feature set of the product when running on an older OS. We need to add code that not only checks the version of the OS our product runs on, but also code that approximates the functionality of the new feature set that is acceptable when running on an older OS. Some of the latest features simply cannot be emulated at all on previous OS versions. Thus, can we emulate that functionality on the older or do we not take advantge of the newer features?

To support 3 different operating systems requires potentially 3 different sets of code that must be developed and maintained. With Windows 7 coming to market soon that number increases to 4. Eventually, developing and maintaining that code becomes too costly. Not taking advantage of the newest features makes your product appear somewhat out-dated. Tracking down software bugs on each of the OS platforms can be a nightmare.

To sum this entry up: the soon to be released Time Monitor v1.0.9 product will be the last version that supports Win2000. We will be dropping Win2000 support in Time Monitor v2.0 when it ships to take advantage of some of the later OS capabilities that simply cannot be emulated appropriately. We feel that supporting Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 will keep us busy enough. Stay tuned for more details regarding the next minor and major releases of Time Monitor.

Till next time...