It may be too late for you, but last week I got an email from the company
that makes my accounting software warning customers not to upgrade to
Catalina. They said they've been working on the transition for a year and
thought they'd finish in time but it didn't work out. They were quite
up-front about it, said they were working hard and would let us know when
it was ready.
That seemed thoughtful, and probably saved them a lot of tech support as
well. On the other hand, I almost never upgrade to the first release of a
major dot-zero version. I wait for the wrinkles to shake out.
--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
On October 9, 2019 10:52:25 AM Paul Dupuis via use-livecode
<use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote:
Customer (at least ours) do not understand 32 bit vs 64-bit. They will
only know that (a) Apple says there is a new update for their computer
and they click to update; or (b) as a member of some university or
business, their computer is upgraded (perhaps at their request, perhaps
as part of a planned upgrade cycle).
In either case, after they or some IT person has helped with the OS
update, suddenly some of their software (including ours) no longer works
(being 32-bit). They don't know why. They don't care why.
Now as for the "Well, Apple has been notifying you forever that, as a
developer, you needed to be at 64 bits" or "But if you make your apps in
LiveCode, just recompile with LiveCode 9"
Our apps have hundreds of thousands of line of code. In migrating them
to LiveCode 9, at first they would not even run. In the course of
migrating, Researchware staff has filed some 40 Livecode 9 bugs, some of
which have no or no good workarounds, that directly impact features of
our apps. Thankfully, most have work-arounds, but work-arounds and
testing take time. Now for the record, LiveCode, Ltd. has been
absolutely great in suggesting work-arounds or helping us work through
the most serious of the bugs.
Our customers do not need 64 bits. Our very niche software does what it
needs to do in 32 bits. Our customer have no disk space issues or memory
issues due to both 32 and 64 bits libraries or support. Our customers
would all be very happy to just keep using our tools as is. Hence, my
venting is about Apple's intentionally planned obsolescence. What our
customers want in new versions is not 64 bit, but functional
enhancements to what our software does.
Being a small (very small), we have sunk a year of development in to
getting to LC9 for 64 bit and making sure what we have in our app just
works (QA testing!). We have had no resources to work on new or enhanced
features. So our customers get an upgrade, with almost nothing new
except 64 bit support, which also means with nothing new, we can't in
good conscious charge an upgrade fee for it. Which means lost revenue,
which badly hurts our small business.
Should we have migrated to LC9 sooner? Probably, but doing so would have
meant - as it does now - only doing the migration and not new
features/revenue. Also doing in now, we still found 40 bugs. If we did
it a year or two ago, how many more bugs would we have found that have
since been fixed!
That's what Catalina represents to us. I realize that many many Apple
customers will be delighted with Catalina and I am happy for them. I
just wish that Apple cared a bit more about not breaking what came
before. Say what you will about Microsoft, but I still have specialty
applications written for Windows 2000/XP that run fine under Windows 10!
Microsoft is guilty of many many sins, but **for the most part** they
try to keep things that once once worked still working.
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