5. Great CTX News!

UPDATE: 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.

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ArtMatic CTX 1.1 (Designer, Voyager, Explorer) build 3, and MetaSynth CTX 1.0 build 6 have been tested under Big Sur and are working. Whew, it’s been a nail-biting, nerve-wracking doldrums for 6 weeks, but Eric has done it. Magic. We’ve also had a couple of testers confirm that the applications run normally on the M1 Mac. While I am still deeply disappointed in Apple Developer Support, the Apple Rosetta 2 (Intel emulation on ARM processors) have done a fantastic job! We are now back to normal testing to ensure the products are ready for prime time and can be released into the wild.

Select ArtMatic CTX 1.0 users have been seeded the latest builds and it is looking good. Software Development is an iterative process and never really done. It’s just a question of when is a release solid and ready to face the wider world. Fingers and toes we are past this Big Sur hurtle and we can get back to the Cocoa MacOS+iOS on the Mac one. Once these four apps ship we can finish Xx CTX 1.0 (Midi for MetaSynth), test it, and ship it for our stand-alone MIDI users as well as folks who use it to Import/Export MIDI data into MetaSynth image+sound data.

At that point only vQuartz will be the only U&I application for Carbon MacOS that has not been recreated for Cocoa (okay, and Videodelic from the MacOS Classic days. I hear you fans who keep a MacOS 9 Mac running just to use it!). vQuartz is tricky as Apple dropped Quartz along with Carbon MacOS and the Cocoa MacOS’s use only Metal for graphics, so it’s a deeper reprogramming and even the product name does not make as much sense. Tho’ I think the name will stay. It’s such an interesting alternative to Photoshop+Premiere all in one app, I’m excited we will see a CTX version, it’s just going to take time and getting past the impacts of Big Sur.

I’m getting ahead of ourselves, the next stop after getting the first 5 apps done is porting the new versions to also being ARM processor Mac native. This is supposed to be fairly easy, vs. the Cocoa rebuilds, but Big Sur wasn’t supposed to break Catalina applications either. Wish us luck. Seeing how good the Rosetta 2 (Intel on ARM processors) is working, there is hope that Universal 2 (applications native to both platforms) will work just as well and customers will not notice the difference.

Happy Holidays all, and here is to wrapping up the Apple Cocoa platform rebuild new CTX journey in 2021 so we can all just focus on having with our U&I Software Creative ToolboX for years to come. We’ll be working through the holidays to ensure that day is sooner rather than later. Appreciate your support in this journey.

All the best,

Kevin