Alfred was released on Feb 28th 2010, two and half years after the release of Leopard (26th October 2007) however I decided to add support for Leopard as a few of my close friends had yet to update to Snow Leopard.

Since release, supporting Leopard in many ways has been holding back Alfred from a number of different perspectives but mostly technical - Not being able to take advantage of newer APIs provided by Apple for performance and added awesomesauce.

With the ever-closing release of OS X Lion and the latest release of XCode 4 which doesn’t officially support Leopard 10.5 without a bit of hacking, I have decided that after the next release of Alfred (0.9), I will be branching the code base. From 0.9.x onwards, I will only be adding new features to the 10.6+ version of Alfred.

This has a number of advantages. Firstly, Leopard will no longer be holding the development of Alfred back. For users of OS X 10.6+ you will see performance increases, improved visual candy, more efficient code just to name a few. Secondly, by branching the code, 0.9 can still get little hot fixes if there are any problems which arise in the Leopard version.

To summarise…

Alfred 0.9 will be supported on 10.5 but from the 0.9.x release onwards, only new features will be added to the 10.6+ version of Alfred.

But but but, I’m on 10.5 and all disappointed and stuff

Don’t worry, Alfred 0.9 will be by FAR the most substantial release of Alfred to date, every single area of Alfred will be improved. If you have no alternative but to remain on OS X 10.5, you will have an incredible, fully featured and polished piece of software!

Ooooh, I’m on 10.6!!

*HIGH FIVE!!!*