Catalina

[J. Landman Gay]

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 | jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
On October 9, 2019 10:52:25 AM Paul Dupuis via use-livecode 
<use-livecode at 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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