6. Big Sur Update II

ArtMatic CTX 1.1 (Designer, Voyager, Explorer) has been released to CTX 1.0 customer accounts. This is a free upgrade. If you have not upgraded your software before, please read the Updates section of the Support page on this site. As you may know these were “unexpected” projects. In November, we were in the middle of wrapping up the development of MetaSynth CTX 1.0 and had starting testing when the release version of Big Sur(prise) came out and broke all the apps. That meant no MetaSynth for Xmas as we felt it important to resolve the issue for ArtMatic users. Unfortunately, this took a lot longer than imagined. The issue turned out to be a bug in Apple’s AppKit that controls user interfaces under Cocoa, and they were not responding to our paid developer code support tickets (still haven’t). So, Eric had to find the issue himself and come up with a work-a-round. In the end, he had to modify the Application Framework, which is deep code, which meant deep testing. Suddenly the programs were all functioning 5x’s slower than before! That was not going to work… found the problem. Apple had changed their C++ compiler in Xcode 10 and it slows down all rendering and pure maths processing. He went back to compiling with Xcode 8 and viola! The programs ran great even on M1 Macs. Whew! But this means we can’t 1. Create native ARM processor versions, and 2. Can’t compile for the App Store. Nothing we can do until Apple fixes this. I’ve opened a ticket. We are interested in getting into the App Store as Apple has reduced their price mark up from 30% to 15%. Much more fair for customers. Bottom line a week of code work has turned into months of work and distraction from completing the new MetaSynth CTX program, and Xx CTX too. The good news is I shipped all three ArtMatic products and Eric immediately started hammering away at bug fixes for it. Also, I built a parallel MetaSynth test team that’s been working with it and creating video tutorials at the same time as the ArtMatic team was working away. So, the 10 weeks lost is more like 6 weeks lost, and MSCTX1.0 should be released soon too. Thank you for all your patience and support as we went through all of this, and worked through the holidays to ensure the Big Sur issues got addressed. The CTX project solders on!

p.s. While there were pauses on Xmas eve and day, I implemented dynamic translation of the U&I Software website by partnering with DeepL. They currently have 11 languages and are adding more. They believe in quality over quantity and surveys show them to be 20x’s better than other services. Happy to bring our apps to a wider audience in 2021 and beyond.