3. CTX 1.0 Continues

Eric continues to work daily on his 4-year journey to recreate his discontinued Carbon products for Apple’s Cocoa environment. Make sure to read blogs 1. and 2. for a sense of this journey and what CTX 1.0 products are. Bottom line, Apple chose to break with the past and align the Mac brand with their iDevice technology both in operating system (Cocoa) and in hardware (ARM/
AppleSilicon Processors). As a result, current Macs can run iOS apps natively as well. This makes sense for them as a hardware/software integrated company. Let’s start here, CTX 1.0 products are new Apple apps for their current platform that took years to make and are sold as such.

It does mean that customers no longer have an operating system to run their Carbon applications on after MacOS 10.14.6. If you have updated an Intel Mac to Catalina or Big Sur you’ve moved on to a Cocoa only world. It’s similar to changing your OS to Windows – it does not run the software for the other platform.

To continue running the last upgrades of the discontinued Carbon products ArtMatic Engine: Designer 7.5.3, Voyager 4.5.3, VQuartz 4.5.3; and MetaSynth 6.0.1, and Xx 5.5.2 you’d need to create a dual boot computer with a Carbon MacOS such as 10.14.6. I use Apple’s BootCamp, some other folks use third-party tools like Parallels or VMware to run both a Carbon/Cocoa OS like Mojave and CocoaMac+iOS OS like Catalina. If you can’t find the right MacOS installers, try the download part of this guys’ tool.

If you plan to continue running a Carbon MacOS or have an older machine at hand, the option to upgrade to the final versions is still possible on the Legacy Website -> Store page. They are available at an “end of life” discount. If you have moved on to Cocoa watch for new CTX 1.0 products the store on this site as they become available.

ArtMatic CTX 1.0 (Designer, Voyager, Explorer) have been completed for Catalina and are currently available. There have been three upgrades and all of them have been FREE to CTX 1.0 users. They are backwards compatible to MacOS 10.10 but doing so creates issues between Apple and U&I. Eric is balancing that with the fact that so many legacy customers continue to use older MacOS versions. There is a survey up to help us balance the benefit/risks of this moving forward. Big Sur contains a bug in Apple’s AppKit that runs Cocoa user interfaces. We have a case open with Apple and are engaging them to resolve it. Eric has created yet another “work-a-round” to avoid the Apple bugs encountered but this one reduces application performance, so he’d prefer they fix it.

MetaSynth+Xx CTX 1.0 is in development and we are starting to test it. It’s user interface uses Apple’s AppKit so has the same issue with Big Sur erasing parts of the application interface, so the volunteers are focusing on MacOS 10.10-10.13 and 10.14 and 10.15 for now. Finishing Xx should happen rapidly after MSCTX1.0 is gold.

So the work… step 1. Recreate the applications in Cocoa. 2. Ensure they work on Catalina (Cocoa Only, and Mojave (Carbon/Cocoa), and Older MacOS (Carbon/Cocoa old Apple file format). 3. Revise them so they work on Big Sur for Intel machines. 4. Port the applications for ARM/Apple Silicon processors 5. Other revisions to align with Apple’s current state.

Of course, right now, resolving the Big Sur AppKit issue for all CTX apps is impacting the MS and Xx development timelines and pushing VQuartz for Metal even further into 2021. Same story all of 2020. The Windows versions of the apps have been on hold for some time – make sure you are on the newsletter list, see the support page. The decision was to base them on the CTX apps and not the Carbon ones, which made sense in 2019, but with 9-15 months of delays due to Apple bugs and Cocoa challenges this has made them only a glint in my eye on the project plan. Working with the Windows developer is now behind all the rest of the To Dos.

All of Apple’s changes in operating systems and processors (remember the real MacOS and PowerPC processors?) has been a real challenge for U&I to continue existing, repeatedly. The ways to subsidize the costs for customers is long gone and the desktop application market has changed greatly over the last 20 years. Many companies pay for them via other investments as the costs will never be recovered. We greatly appreciate your support of what is largely a volunteer effort to make sure these programs continue to be made available (unlike those that didn’t such as Bryce, Videodelic, VTrack…). Your donations to that cause literally keep the wheels on the bus.

Kevin