Some folks were perplexed by the fact that Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and went straight to Windows 10. The urban legend is that so many old applications checked which version of Windows was running by doing something like version.startsWith("Windows 9") to see if they were on 95 or 98, that Microsoft risked breaking otherwise working code if they released Windows 9.

But gone are those days of doing string munging to check which version of an OS we’re running on. We’ve got much better ways to check what features and functionality are available without having to parse strings out, right?

John D found some TypeScript code in a Ionic app that needs to adapt to different versions of iOS:

private iOS13Device(): boolean {
		// fix for ios 13 pan end issue
		if (
			this.isIOS13Device === undefined &&
			this.deviceService.isiOS &&
			this.deviceInfoService.deviceInfo &&
			this.deviceInfoService.deviceInfo.osVersion &&
			this.deviceInfoService.deviceInfo.osVersion.indexOf('_') &&
			this.deviceInfoService.deviceInfo.osVersion.split('_') &&
			this.deviceInfoService.deviceInfo.osVersion.split('_')[0] &&
			this.deviceInfoService.deviceInfo.osVersion.split('_')[0] === '11'
		) {
			this.isIOS13Device = true;
			return this.isIOS13Device;
		} else {
			this.isIOS13Device = false;
			return this.isIOS13Device;
		}
	}

Well, at least they’re caching the result.

Also, I’m no expert on iOS device strings, but this seems to imply that an iOS13Device (an OS which just came out recently) reports its OS version number as a string starting with 11. Maybe that’s correct, but in either case, that seems like a bonus WTF.

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