Early Catalina Updates

Apple was quick to release a public macOS 10.15 beta this year, so some of you may already be installing it to give it a spin. If you haven’t installed it yet, I strongly encourage you to be more cautious than usual.

This year’s update to macOS includes a large number of significant architectural changes that are likely to break compatibility with some of your apps. Notably, Apple has dramatically revised the filesystem in such a way that most backup solutions will need to be updated, and they have finally dropped support for older, 32-bit applications.

Luckily for Red Sweater customers, all of our apps are, as of today, compatible with Catalina 10.15. Beta macOS releases are a moving target, so I can’t vouch for them continuing to work perfectly. As always, there are risks to running beta software, and there are risks to running even production software on beta macOS releases. But for those you who are daring enough to proceed with caution, here is the status for each of our currently shipping apps:

MarsEdit and Black Ink

MarsEdit and Black Ink were ready to hit the ground running. As long as you’re running the latest version 4.3.2 of MarsEdit, and either Black Ink 1.7.11, or the much-improved Black Ink 2 beta, you should be in good shape.

FastScripts

FastScripts 2.7.8, available today, addresses a crashing bug that affects users who have Finder aliases of a certain vintage in their Scripts folder. The Apple frameworks for resolving these files has a bug in the 10.15 public beta, and FastScripts has now been updated to work around the problem.

FlexTime

FlexTime 1.4.1, also available today, addresses a bug that caused the app to crash at launch on 10.15.

Clarion

Clarion 2.2 is a slightly more substantial update. It addresses a crash-at-launch bug on the 10.15 public beta, and also introduces a few additional enhancements to the app:

Dark Mode support for macOS 10.14

Clarion now requires macOS 10.12 or greater

Add NSSupportsAutomaticGraphicsSwitching to Info.plist to avoid depending on high power GPU

Fix a crash when launching on an future version of macOS

The Mac App Store version of Clarion 2.2 is not yet approved but should be available soon.

Touché

Touché 1.1.4 has been updated to address a crash-on-launch bug on the 10.15 public beta.

Caveat

One change in 10.15 is that Apple now requires apps to be “notarized” in order to avoid the system flagging the app as being from an “unidentified developer.” I’m working on getting all of my apps notarized with Apple, but in the mean time if you download an app directly on the public beta, you may need to right-click it in the Finder, select “Open” and then agree to proceed with allowing the app to launch.

Anything Else?

If you run into any problems with Red Sweater apps, either related to 10.15 Catalina or not, please drop us a line!