Future operating system support in Photo Ninja

While we have not decided on specific timing, support for some older operating systems might be discontinued in a future update of Photo Ninja:

• All 32-bit operating systems. The 2-gigabyte-per-process memory limit is increasingly impractical for high-end image processing, especially as megapixel counts keep climbing. Moreover, 32-bit computers tend to be older, slower machines, so the user experience is subpar for a computing-intensive application like Photo Ninja. (Note that Apple's Aperture 3.3 and Adobe's Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS6 already have already dropped 32-bit support.)
• OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Due to upgrades in development tools, system libraries, programming languages, and our code base it might not be possible to continue backward compatibility for OS X 10.6. Apple appears to have stopped security updates for Snow Leopard, and other vendors (including Adobe) are already specifying 10.7 (Lion) in the system requirements for their latest products. (Snow Leopard was almost five years ago.)
• Windows XP. See discussion above regarding 32-bit operating systems. The vast majority of XP deployments are 32-bit; 64-bit XP has a miniscule market share. (Note that XP support was already dropped in Adobe's Lightroom 4, and the next version of Photoshop will follow suit. Moreover, Microsoft has officially dropped support for Windows XP.)
• Windows Vista. Very limited market share among our target audience. Most users skipped Vista or migrated to Windows 7.

Most of our professional and serious amateur users have already moved to recent-generation 64-bit operating systems, so we do not expect a large number of users to be impacted if we drop support for the systems listed above. For those who are still using one of these older systems, we encourage you to start planning for a migration to a newer, 64-bit operating system.