For several years now, Apple has been telling developers to stop using QuickTime and move to AVFoundation, Apple’s preferred API for audio and video. This past June at WWDC, Apple took the next step labeling QuickTime as deprecated meaning that it would be receiving no further love and would eventually disappear entirely.
Apple’s Mac App Store guidelines make it clear that apps using deprecated technologies can be rejected and not long ago Apple began doing just that. Enough developers complained and Apple temporarily started approving apps that use QuickTime, but this is only to give developers their final warning. Some Xojo developers have been caught in this trap because the Xojo framework uses QuickTime for the MoviePlayer as well as creating and editing QuickTime movies.
Apple will soon return to rejecting Mac App Store submissions with QuickTime. QuickTime is also not supported for 64-bit, something that Apple could also one day begin requiring. Because of this, we have removed QuickTime from Xojo 2014r1. The OS X implementation of the MoviePlayer has been rewritten using AVFoundation. The ability to create and edit QuickTime movies, however, has not been rewritten because AVFoundation and QuickTime are not similar enough. Also, AVFoundation, unlike QuickTime, runs on OS X only. If you need these functions, there are third party solutions available.
Usually when we deprecate something, we leave it in for quite a while before removing it but that wasn’t an option this time. If there’s an upside to this it’s that moving to newer technologies does push Xojo forward and that’s a good thing.