macOS 10.15

[GeorgeC]

Mostly transparent upgrade, runs fine, even on my mid-2012 hardware. Had to punt fewer old apps than I expected. The new fine-grained ACLs seem nice.

 

[Matthew]

I installed it last night.

I ran into 2 apps that won’t work: my Brother printer utility, and my Harmony universal remote utility. Tech support at both products said to expect new drivers/utilities within the next couple weeks. The remote works fine but I’m stuck for now if I want to reprogram it.

The printer is still usable through the Mac printer/scanner settings but the Brother full service s/w is not.

I have not played with it enough yet to see how iTunes libraries were converted.

 

[GeorgeC]

The iPhoto->Photos migration was unintuitive, but at least it mangled my photo library. Yet another for the "considered harmful" trash heap.

 

[kayoh190]

I still have a couple of 32 bit apps that I don't want to do without, so I'm waiting a bit to make the jump. One of the apps is my logbook - wish that lazy effing developer would get off his sorry ass and update it.

 

[Matthew]

I still have a couple of 32 bit apps that I don't want to do without, so I'm waiting a bit to make the jump. One of the apps is my logbook - wish that lazy effing developer would get off his sorry ass and update it.

I did find a few other apps that didn't make the jump, but I was able to download the 64-bit versions last night without any problems.

I *think* there's only 2 that I'm waiting on the vendor to update (they say, "real soon, now").

It was my fault for not paying attention closely enough to what this OS update would do. It I had, I would have updated the apps first so I wouldn't have been surprised by what was about to happen.

 

[jsstevens]

I still have a couple of 32 bit apps that I don't want to do without, so I'm waiting a bit to make the jump. One of the apps is my logbook - wish that lazy effing developer would get off his sorry ass and update it.

Maybe if you paid him more...

 

[kayoh190]

Maybe if you paid him more...

He'd just blow it on booze and hookers. Plus his code sucks and is poorly documented. I don't want to encourage bad habits!

 

[Matthew]

He'd just blow it on booze and hookers.

I think these days it would be "booze and sex robots".

 

[flyingcheesehead]

It was my fault for not paying attention closely enough to what this OS update would do. It I had, I would have updated the apps first so I wouldn't have been surprised by what was about to happen.

Ironically, there have been warnings that popped up from time to time about the developers needing to update the app for future compatibility...

... Ever since Apple moved to 64-bit apps.

In 2009.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

For anyone interested in upgrading, here's how you can check and see what apps aren't compatible with the new OS: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/macos-10-15-warning-32-bit-apps

I didn't realize how much old crap WebEx, Citrix, etc were leaving behind on my machine. I'm going to free up quite a bit of space by cleaning all that crap up!

Another thing you can do, if your hard drive is using the APFS filesystem (check in Disk Utility - APFS was released with Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra a couple years ago) is to set up a dual-boot system and run both 10.14 Mojave and 10.15 Catalina: https://macpaw.com/how-to/dual-boot-catalina-mojave

 

[GeorgeC]

The iPhoto->Photos migration was unintuitive, but at least it mangled my photo library. Yet another for the "considered harmful" trash heap.

But wait, it gets worse. I manually fixed up and reimported my photo library. The next day, I noticed my fans going berserk, and discovered photoanalysisd crunching away for longer than I cared to wait. Killed it, deleted the photo library, put the rest of my photos elsewhere until I have time to deal with it.

Later, did my usual thing of using a hot corner to put the display to sleep... and fans go berserk again for no discernable reason.

Wait this one out.

 

[Matthew]

Ironically, there have been warnings that popped up from time to time about the developers needing to update the app for future compatibility...

... Ever since Apple moved to 64-bit apps.

In 2009.

I got the pop-up warnings on certain apps for a long time. But this time they really meant it.

There were a handful that I rarely used, and would just skip past the warning. With 10.15 they show up grayed out and covered by a circle with a line through it. It only took a few minutes to update the ones I could, but I still have 2 that I'm waiting on the vendor to fix.

I haven't checked the photo library yet, I'll be doing that either tonight or sometime this weekend. But the music library is there, sort of. I haven't done any syncing for a while between the MacBook and my phone, so I don't know what's going to happen. I did update the phone to iOS13.xxx the other day, too, so they should be on compatible versions. I still need to update my wife's phone though. One of the things I noticed the other night was when I opened up the Music app to make sure all our stuff was still there I found multiple copies of the same songs. For example, I could open up a particular album and I'd see all the songs, but there would be multiple copies of each. Only on the McBook, not on the McPhone. I don't know if this is new or not.

 

[kayoh190]

Appreciate the heads up George. Mojave is stable and fine for everything I do - I'll stick with it. I hate the keyboard on the new Macs, so my 2015 MBP might just be the end of macOS for me. I've found that I don't actually hate Windows 10, but I also need a command line - so perhaps my next laptop will dual boot Windows and BSD. The MBP is running strong though - no hurry there.

 

[gkainz]

I'm on Macbook Pro Mojave (10.14.6) and have an older release of Microsoft Remote Desktop (8.0.44) running that's been warning "This client will soon be deprecated..." ... any idea if this release survives the 10.15 upgrade?

I have to hold off another few days for corporate to bless the IOS upgrade.

 

[GeorgeC]

I can't speak to rdp v8.x, but I just installed the v10 client the other day, and it works. Wonder how long before they rewrite it in Electron...

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Appreciate the heads up George. Mojave is stable and fine for everything I do - I'll stick with it. I hate the keyboard on the new Macs, so my 2015 MBP might just be the end of macOS for me. I've found that I don't actually hate Windows 10, but I also need a command line - so perhaps my next laptop will dual boot Windows and BSD. The MBP is running strong though - no hurry there.

Y'know, people complain about the keyboard an awful lot, but my 3-month-old MacBookPro at work hasn't ever really annoyed me... But now that you mention it I'm annoyed sitting here typing on my 2012 MBP's keyboard because I have to push the buttons further down.

But, I don't think Apple is going to stick with the current keyboards. Way too many complaints about them. They just need to figure out how to stick a better (which usually means thicker) keyboard into such a slim case. The rumor mill has been strongly hinting that we'll see new MacBooks soon with a different keyboard.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

The iPhoto->Photos migration was unintuitive, but at least it mangled my photo library. Yet another for the "considered harmful" trash heap.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that when Apple does a "migration" like that it's best to do it within the first version or two. I think that if you wait for 2+ years to do a migration, you might run into trouble because they aren't testing it as much any more, assuming everyone already did it.

My home laptop is on 10.12.6 Sierra still. That's kinda ancient... But I still have Photos and did the migration ages ago with no ill effect. Thanks for the warning, and tread carefully.

 

[gkainz]

I can't speak to rdp v8.x, but I just installed the v10 client the other day, and it works. Wonder how long before they rewrite it in Electron...

Saw a lot of ugly reviews on v10 on support forums. It’s a must have for me now that my teamviewer decided my use was more than personal.

 

[GeorgeC]

One thing I've noticed over the years is that when Apple does a "migration" like that it's best to do it within the first version or two. I think that if you wait for 2+ years to do a migration, you might run into trouble because they aren't testing it as much any more, assuming everyone already did it.

Yep, I got burned by iMovie the same way, maybe a decade ago. I had the nerve to skip a couple of update cycles and suddenly all my content was orphaned. The only winning move is not to play.

 

[kath]

Do I need to mess with my Xcode/Xquartz if I update to Catalina?
I updated... it didn't say anything about needing a new Xcode, but I notice that some tools that I use (like emacs) are no longer there.

 

[GeorgeC]

I updated my commandline devtools.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Do I need to mess with my Xcode/Xquartz if I update to Catalina?
I updated... it didn't say anything about needing a new Xcode, but I notice that some tools that I use (like emacs) are no longer there.

I think some of the Unixy stuff changed... I know they switched the default terminal shell from bash to zsh.

Now, if they got rid of emacs and are making us all switch to vi, there's gonna be a fight.

 

[gkainz]

emacs ... the only editor so obtuse that it tells you how to exit on its entrance prompt ... but it's been years (VMS years) since I accidentally stumbled down the emacs rabbit hole.

 

[atbroome]

Y'know, people complain about the keyboard an awful lot, but my 3-month-old MacBookPro at work hasn't ever really annoyed me... But now that you mention it I'm annoyed sitting here typing on my 2012 MBP's keyboard because I have to push the buttons further down.

I'm in the "my 2015 MBP will be my last until Apple fixes the keyboard" camp. My wife has a MB with the new keyboard and every time I need to use it I involuntarily yell out "How to you type on this thing?!?" Hey, my typing style may be terrible but for me I can't use the new keyboards.

There is nothing in Catalina I need/want, so I am sticking with Mojave for at least a few more months.

 

[jsstevens]

emacs ... the only editor so obtuse that it tells you how to exit on its entrance prompt ... but it's been years (VMS years) since I accidentally stumbled down the emacs rabbit hole.

I worked on a software development team that all used EMACS ~20 years ago. I think this biggest indictment of EMACS is that no two people could swap editors and work. It's EDiting MACroS after all. The only thing I used it for was merging files. It had a nice way of doing that. Otherwise, vi all the way. I can still do things in vi (with ex, the underlying line editor and regexp) that are difficult, if not impossible in the the IDEs I've used. I'm not current on IDEs now and the inline references, chroma coding, etc. are really nice. But making a big, repetitive change? Give me vi and watch out.

 

[gkainz]

I worked on a software development team that all used EMACS ~20 years ago. I think this biggest indictment of EMACS is that no two people could swap editors and work. It's EDiting MACroS after all. The only thing I used it for was merging files. It had a nice way of doing that. Otherwise, vi all the way. I can still do things in vi (with ex, the underlying line editor and regexp) that are difficult, if not impossible in the the IDEs I've used. I'm not current on IDEs now and the inline references, chroma coding, etc. are really nice. But making a big, repetitive change? Give me vi and watch out.

Agreed. Back on VMS, I used TPU and EVE (Extensible VAX editor) ... same deal. Once you start adding extensions to "your" editor, it's all on you.
We had a funny little argument between the VMS guys and the Unix guys about which was better. The only thing they could point out that VMS couldn't do natively that Unix did was "tail" ... a few commands in EVE and a global variable and we had VMS "tail"

 

[jsstevens]

Agreed. Back on VMS, I used TPU and EVE (Extensible VAX editor) ... same deal. Once you start adding extensions to "your" editor, it's all on you.
We had a funny little argument between the VMS guys and the Unix guys about which was better. The only thing they could point out that VMS couldn't do natively that Unix did was "tail" ... a few commands in EVE and a global variable and we had VMS "tail"

I never worked in VMS but I did a fair amount of work in RSX-11. I think the thing I most like about UNIX that's carried over to Linux is the orthoganality of "everything is a stream of bytes". Memory, any device you can connect, files, directories, all of it can be passed through any of the stdin->stdout tools to do all sorts of useful stuff. Couple that with the power of regular expressions and wow can you do some really complex stuff quickly!

 

[BillyBH]

If you have an Apple Watch, Catalina uses it to open the Computer AND submit passwords automatically. Neat.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

If you have an Apple Watch, Catalina uses it to open the Computer AND submit passwords automatically. Neat.

Cool. I'm really happy with how easy Face ID/Touch ID has made things these days, automatically unlocking all kinds of apps without having to type a password. And the phone can unlock the watch, too...

I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't added Face ID to a laptop yet, though maybe that's just because of how many people tape over laptop cameras.

There is nothing in Catalina I need/want, so I am sticking with Mojave for at least a few more months.

Yeah, I'm going to move to a dual boot setup, for a silly reason: When I was going down the list of apps that hadn't been updated to 64-bit yet, an old favorite came up: Return to Dark Castle. Dark Castle was an amazing (for its time) black-and-white adventure by Silicon Beach Software where you controlled our hero, Duncan, through a castle, throwing rocks at rats, bats, guards, and mutants on your way to saving the kingdom from the Black Knight. A couple of years later they came out with a sequel called Beyond Dark Castle that added a helicopter pack and a whole new castle. Both were for "original" Mac OS and IIRC were unplayable after Mac OS X came out.

Well, finally the original game designer got the rights back, colorized it, updated it for OS X, added a whole mess of new levels including all those from both of the original games... But now hasn't updated it. And while I haven't played it in years, I kinda want to be able to.

So, I'll set up a dual boot with Mojave and Catalina. That's going to involve a (scary) full backup and deletion of my hard drive so that I can reformat it as APFS, which has live repartitioning. Hopefully it'll also buy me enough free space (since logs and other various unused stuff doesn't get backed up, and that saved me a couple hundred gigs last time I did it) to install two OSes. I'll install Mojave on one partition and Catalina on another. I'll probably keep iTunes on the Mojave install and such too, just in case...

But, that's gonna be a fair bit of work, so I haven't really been itching to do it.

 

[kath]

Dark Castle was an amazing (for its time) black-and-white adventure by Silicon Beach Software where you controlled our hero, Duncan, through a castle, throwing rocks at rats, bats, guards, and mutants on your way to saving the kingdom from the Black Knight.

OMG... way to take me back to SIGNIFICANT fractions of my days as a young kid, on the family Macintosh...
To this day, if I imitate the noise the mutants make ("Nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh!") everyone in my family will recognize it instantly and have a nostalgic chuckle.

 

[kayoh190]

OMG... way to take me back to SIGNIFICANT fractions of my days as a young kid, on the family Macintosh...
To this day, if I imitate the noise the mutants make ("Nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh!") everyone in my family will recognize it instantly and have a nostalgic chuckle.

That’s awesome - if you were to make that mutant noise to me I’d know EXACTLY what it was. Drove my parents nuts back in the day.

 

[denverpilot]

Ironically, there have been warnings that popped up from time to time about the developers needing to update the app for future compatibility...

... Ever since Apple moved to 64-bit apps.

In 2009.

Anyone else think this with the new OSX name? LOL...

There isn’t any REAL tech reason to drop 32 bit support. The main reason is laziness. Same reason a few Linux distros are dropping it.

The 32 bit libraries embarrassed the software “engineers” in that they forgot to check for buffer overflows in them, which essentially means... they all wrote crap code and someone finally thought about it and realized they could attack through them.

I love the kwality of my chosen biz and that people think it’s really hard to not write garbage. Job security baby. Roll those daily patches! LOL.

At least the Linux distros have the excuse that they don’t get paid to fix the old crap code. LOL.

Well a few do. But the money isn’t exactly flowing at Ubuntu anymore. And with RedHat an IBM subsidiary serving mostly government contacts, well... government Linux crap will be 32 bit supported for another 20 years and still running Oracle. Haha.

I predict for 2020: More bugs. And y’all will keep paying to patch them. Cash... money!

I also predict Chrome and Firefox pretending they know DNS better than everyone else with their DNS over HTTPS thing will be the root cause of a serious security problem that hits a LOT of people. Soon.

Anyway. We can all meet up at the Catalina wine mixer.

I’ve got one app that won’t work. It’s a text editor. Because text editors now need 64 bit memory spaces. Hahaha. I guess I’ll replace it. My terminal emulator already updated. LOL.

 

[GeorgeC]

I'll probably just shave off a partition for BSD and prepare for a long winter.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

OMG... way to take me back to SIGNIFICANT fractions of my days as a young kid, on the family Macintosh...
To this day, if I imitate the noise the mutants make ("Nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh!") everyone in my family will recognize it instantly and have a nostalgic chuckle.

That’s awesome - if you were to make that mutant noise to me I’d know EXACTLY what it was. Drove my parents nuts back in the day.

Hahaha!!! Well, if you want to relive it (although not nearly as fun) after you've already upgraded to Catalina, you'll have to settle for these:

And the modern one:

Watching these reminded me what a brilliant game Dark Castle was for its time. In an era where computer audio usually meant beeps, it had realistic, digitized sounds. Despite the limitations of the 9" 512x342 black and white screen, the graphics were pretty good. The gameplay and story were fantastic.

If you haven't upgraded to Catalina yet... Go here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/return-to-dark-castle/id410703154?mt=12 I hope you have a couple hours to burn. (Sorry.)

 

[denverpilot]

I'll probably just shave off a partition for BSD and prepare for a long winter.

Depending on your hardware it might take all winter to get it installed! LOL!

Especially if you stray from FreeBSD into the really ancient ones. Hahaha.

At least you didn’t say SCO.

 

[GeorgeC]

Upgraded to 10.15.1. photoanalysisd no longer goes ape. Tried to sync some music to my iPod shuffle, they play in random order, and no longer show up in Music.app; another one for the "considered harmful" pile. Guess a SanDisk Clip Jam is in my future.