ericInqScribe is closing in on ten years old. It’s been a point of pride that InqScribe still runs on older systems — with InqScribe 2.2, as far back as OS X 10.4 and Windows 2000.
Now, however, the media playback engine changes we discussed earlier are forcing us to reconsider that approach for future versions of InqScribe.
To recap, InqScribe’s media playback engines will be moving from QuickTime to AVFoundation on OS X, and from Windows Media Player to DirectShow (or possibly Media Foundation) on Windows. The new engines come with their own system requirements (for AVFoundation, OS X 10.7) that force us to abandon some older systems.
Another important consideration for us is whether Apple and Microsoft support the system versions that InqScribe supports. Here, too, change is coming. Apple is no longer releasing security patches for OS X 10.6, which effectively means they no longer support it. Similarly, Microsoft has announced that they are discontinuing support for Windows XP next month.
We are hesitant to recommend that our users continue to use an unsupported system, primarily because of security issues. With XP in particular, once Microsoft stops issuing security updates, XP systems will be at greater risk for malware.
A benefit of moving to more modern OS versions is that InqScribe will be able to take advantage of some of the features that these systems provide (native spell checking!), without having to worry that users of older systems will be left out.
We think it will be in our users’ best interests to upgrade to a supported system. Combined with the higher system requirements of the media engines, we are planning to update InqScribe’s minimum requirements to the following.
- OS X 10.7. AVFoundation requires OS X 10.7 or newer, which makes this an easy decision.
- Windows 7. Dropping Windows XP support is a given, since Microsoft is doing the same. We could support Windows Vista, but our internal use data suggests that the number of current Vista users using InqScribe is vanishingly small. So we’re planning to jump directly to Windows 7.
If you have an older system, InqScribe 2.2 will continue to work for you. The new system requirements only apply to future versions of InqScribe.
We’re excited for the next release of InqScribe. Talking about system requirements isn’t as exciting, but it’s necessary. We’re announcing these changes now so that users who will be impacted by the system requirements change will have to time to explore their options for upgrading their system before the next version of InqScribe is released.
If you have questions or concerns about these changes, feel free to get in touch and we’ll be happy to clarify. We’ll be continually updating this support article with frequently asked questions and answers. And you can always contact us via our support page.
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