A new Quilt Draw release has been made! To use it, go to its repository page. Known issue: Please turn off Dark Reader for the site.
This is a small release to add support for Firefox 52 ESR (Windows XP and Vista.) There are no new features.
I would like to give a special salute to Mozilla for supporting operating systems longer than strictly necessary.
Why am I doing this?
In 2012, I bought a PC, and work bought a Late 2012 model iMac for my desk. That iMac ended up coming home for the pandemic. They finally replaced it with a System76 laptop (at my request) in 2022, because we have a large investment in VirtualBox and x86, and sometimes they want to fly me to other offices. I didn’t rate it as likely that the last Intel systems from Apple would get a full decade of support, but that’s what I’m targeting for them.
As for my PC… I am writing this on it. It’s still running. It has had an SSD upgrade, of course, because Windows Compatibility Telemetry was such a drag on the hard disk, and it’s had an extra 4 GB of RAM put in (freed up by upgrading a different system.)
It started life with Windows 7, just barely, then moved on through 8, 8.1, and 10. It might live to see the end of support for Windows 10… and then Microsoft thinks it should become e-waste, just like the iMac.
But they’re both perfectly functional machines!
What if I wanted to use hardware for 15 years? 20 years? Could I make my own code run on systems that old?
How does it work?
I discovered that Pickr had an ES5 build (well-supported in IE9+, and crucially, Firefox 52), so I switched to that instead. That allowed for the initial Windows XP/Vista support.
Unreleased but fully tested, I have updated the toolchain for Quilt Draw itself. It used to directly use the Typescript 3.9 compiler. This has been replaced with Webpack and the usual suspects. The new build system supports Typescript 5.1, so now I can catch up on years of new features, and push more of the future deeper into the past.