Page 1 of 1

Yosemite forever

Posted: 2016-12-06 02:05:48
by ptram
Hi,

I don't know how many of us are stuck in Yosemite (nearly) forever. There is software I use for my main job, that will not work under El Capitan and work very bad under Sierra. In the meantime, some software I use for my personal activities, or side projects, no longer supports Yosemite. I'm living a dissociated time.

My hope is that Nisus Writer will support Yosemite at least for some macOS versions, yet. I know it will sooner or later stop supporting older OS versions. I know that one will probably be the last Nisus version I will be able to use for years.

But I wonder if I'm the only one in this situation. Brief: I'm forced to use Adobe Creative Suite CS6, because I'm still asked to make technical documentation as books. Switching to Creative Cloud is not an option for various reasons (and then, it is not yet fully compatible with Sierra). And I would love to give up with the book format definetely, and work with markup and fluid text. But this is not yet possible, since it is not yet fully understood by my clients. Some of the final customers are even printing the (>1000 pages) PDF we give them!

There is other software that I could't trust to in Sierra. Then, Sierra is not yet compatible with a small, powerful, fundamental utility without which I wouldn't be able to use my external keyboard. Karabiner does not yet work. So, Sierra is basically unusable for me.

How do you deal with the future? VirtualBox with a Yosemite virtual machine? Being quiet, and use what you have? One of the publishers I sometimes work with still uses old Macs and outdated Quark XPress versions. They release some of the finest books in Italy. So, why should I care?

Paolo

Re: Yosemite forever

Posted: 2016-12-07 05:09:53
by NisusUser
If it's any comfort to you, I'm still using Yosemite. I think the Mac OS is much too insensitive to backward compatibility.

Re: Yosemite forever

Posted: 2016-12-08 23:41:18
by adryan
G’day, Paolo, NisusUser et al

I use Yosemite and have no intention of “upgrading” any time soon. I have seen too many reports of problems with El Capitan and Sierra to give me any confidence in them.

I can’t say I’ve used Macs since The Crack of Dawn, but it probably wasn’t too long after the echo came back. (I stayed with my trusty Apple IIe — nostalgic sigh! — in the interim.) Those with a similar history will be aware that most of the operating systems have been fairly reasonable (but not necessarily wonderful), the odd one has been a real worry, but every so often there is one that seems particularly stable and just allows you to get on with the job. For example, there is a school of thought (to which I subscribe) that maintains that Snow Leopard was perhaps the most recent of these gems. Mavericks is not too bad; Yosemite is probably not far behind.

I no longer move to a new operating system when it is released, or even after a few iterations of it. In fact, as I’ve indicated, I may skip whole versions entirely. Of course, the problem comes when you feel you need to upgrade some application or other — or install a new application entirely — but the new version won’t work with your existing operating system. Or you experience some disaster and have to replace your computer with one that has the latest — and perhaps questionable — operating system pre-installed. I suppose that in the latter case you could replace the installed OS with your trusty older one, but I suspect few of us would bother to do so.

Let’s face it: we’all just marking time until the advent of affordable, practical quantum computers. (Aren’t we?) It’s not even clear whether Apple will even be in the picture then. But how do we deal with the Macintosh in the meantime?

It seems we can’t really stop the leapfrogging of new operating systems and applications, but there is something application manufacturers can do to help. As time goes by, a sort of community consensus — by no means unanimous, of course — generally emerges as to the overall merit or otherwise of a particular operating system. I think application manufacturers should not abandon users of such an OS until a similar consensus forms around some subsequent OS (which will undoubtedly be after Apple has supplanted it with yet one or more later versions and people begin to realize in retrospect how good the older one really was).

Of course, a large part of the problem is Apple’s fumbling of the ball in so many areas these days, but I won’t extend this rant by elaborating on this here.

Paolo’s lament regarding the relentless evolution of applications and their prerequisites is shared by many of us. Let’s not forget that it’s not just operating systems that can be irritating: newer versions of applications are not always better than their predecessors. What I tend to do is to choose a few well-established, reliable and versatile applications (like Nisus Writer!), then milk the hell out of them by whatever means I can. This allows me to do the work I want to do without having to resort to the latest glitzy product that comes on the market — and with a lot more satisfaction as well.

That publisher has the right idea. Stick with what works until you are somehow forced to change. As long as you can produce the results you want without undue effort, you’re on a winner. Even if you think that the effort may be approaching the “undue” zone, think again: the effort consequent upon migrating to an unsatisfactory “upgrade” of an application or operating system can be far greater and only show how illusory was the promise of that course of action.

Cheers,
Adrian

Re: Yosemite forever

Posted: 2016-12-12 14:35:56
by martin
I too know the pain of constant forced system updates and software incompatibilities. It can be a real nuisance, or even a total work-stopper, especially when you sometimes don't even know which pieces of software will have trouble before you upgrade. Once that's done, reverting is an even bigger headache unless you've prepared for it ahead of time.

Nisus Software tries to support older versions of macOS (née Mac OS X) as long as possible, but that's a burden for us too. It slows development to continue supporting older systems, and prevents us from as easily adopting newer system features.

Apple also makes it unpalatable to spend too much effort for older systems because new system versions are adopted very quickly. In looking at Nisus Writer Pro usage for last month, already more than half of our users are using macOS 10.12 Sierra. That's just incredible considering how short a time it's been available. Last month's usage for OSX 10.10 Yosemite has already dropped to about 10% so it won't make sense for us to support it forever.

Unfortunately I don't have any magic solutions to offer. In the worst case we do make available all older versions of Nisus Writer in our version archives. That way our users always have some version of Nisus Writer available that can run on their Mac.

Re: Yosemite forever

Posted: 2016-12-23 08:49:44
by Vanceone
El Capitan is pretty stable, as Apple has sort of adopted a "tick tock" strategy of "big release" then "Bug fix release." Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, (Mavericks sort of is the odd one out), then El Capitan. Yosemite has bugs, and I think El Capitan is regarded for the most part as more stable.

Sierra has in my opinion a massive, show stopping bug in PDF. Apple destroyed PDFkit and forgot to release whatever they planned to update it with in anything like a useable form. So PDF apps with Sierra simply don't work, most of the time. Thankfully they at least didn't break Core Graphics and "drawing to a PDF context" so printing PDF's still works.

Hopefully Apple gets on the ball, but there is a noticeable rot in software quality going on right now.

Re: Yosemite forever

Posted: 2018-02-26 17:04:39
by ptram
A couple updates on my situation regarding software compatibility.

- Adobe Creative Suite CS6 works (nearly) perfectly under Sierra. Better than under Yosemite. You must however be sure there are no issues with the fonts. No corrupted fonts, no duplicates, nothing that can interfere with CS6.

I say "nearly perfectly", because some unexpected quit still exists in InDesign, as it has always been. Nothing dramatic: files are always preserved, and the problems is quite rare.

- Karabiner is being gradually replaced by Karabiner Elements. Yes, you might have to create your own scripts, but it can be done. I could, and am happy with what I have now.

Sierra is a good experience for me.

Paolo

Re: Yosemite forever

Posted: 2018-12-11 13:06:58
by ptram
Another update: I upgraded to High Sierra. Adobe Creative Suite CS6 continue to work fine, even if you have to check the fonts again. There is some more glitch (for example, Illustrator insists to warn you that it has reset the Color Profile), but nothing too annoying.

HS is a refinement of Sierra, but the upgrade gave me several problems (in particular, Safari and Preview freezing or messing thing up, solved by cleaning all the caches and preferences). However, after a couple weeks of working with it, it seems to work fine.

Paolo