Sierra.... upgrade or not upgrade

So what is the common opinon here… I have heard various pros/cons about biting the bullet… and don’t want to upgrade… and find I’m fighting simple things.

What things (good and bad) has any experienced lately (ie. most recent version)?

I had issues with code signing a few months ago and thought it might be related to Sierra. It was not. I have not really had any issues. I upgraded because, eventually, a developer has to keep up with OS releases.

what was it related to? using AppWrapper? Operator Error? :slight_smile:

Corrupted certificates. Once I, with Sam’s help, got the certs to not be duplicated and have the correct certs in the keychain, it was resolved. BTW - Apple support was ZERO help in solving the issue.

Backup your machine first so that you can revert back if you happen to be one of the unlucky souls who’s machine is borked afterwards, or it just runs really really slowly for you.

There’s a lot of complaints about Sierra and not much love for the handful of features; except that most of them can be disabled and really should be disabled (especially the autobackup to iCloud).

That was frigging nightmare!

Such as, maybe there’s another way?

  • Sierra runs slower than El Cap (1~3 frames).
  • Safari has settled down, but for a while wouldn’t display pages that El Cap would.
  • I’ve disabled Siri, not much use.
  • Disabled iCloud Backup, WHY WAS THIS AUTOMATICALLY ENABLED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
  • Disabled system wide tabbing, on some applications, it’s just bad WHY WAS THIS AUTOMATICALLY ENABLED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
  • I have 8GB in the machine that I use Sierra on, that’s basically enough for Safari and Xojo to be running at the same time and it still needs to swap.

I still use El Cap on the main development machine, although it does need a weekly restart otherwise it really really slow…

I am always hopeful that the next version of the macOS will be one that I can trust, these left 3 years are leaving scars.

That all sounds like valid reasons to NOT upgrade…

oh and Sam… I didn’t mean to imply that AppWrapper was in any way at fault… I respect your work too much for that :slight_smile:

As far as I know Sierra takes over the whole memory. You can boot your Mac and open only the Activity Monitor and there is no unused memory. I think this is related to memory compression and does not mean swapping (which shouldn’t pose any problems if you have an SSD anyway). I have – on a MacBook Pro 17 inch early 2009 with 8 GB – both El Capitan and Sierra on two partitions on the same SSD and I do not see any differences in regard of speed. And I have the same setup on a current MacBook and see also no differences.

macOS Sierra ?

The more free GB on your boot dirve,the speedier it is… (even with SSD, worst with HD boot).
I actually have troubles when I run Firefox at boot time (it crash each time), but Safari works fine ! A subsequent run (Firefox) is OK. Firefox seems to run faster.

macOS was never built to not shut down / reboot.

Because I use a laptop, I power it ON - OFF many times a day; worst: in the past boot, at each (yes EACH) boot, I reset the PRAM (zt I put attention to connect any HD I need to use in the session before the boot.

And I still see strange things coming…

Whe, I want to use Xojo, I remove external HDs, left each and every run application, WiFi OFF, shut down, wait a little bit and Power ON.
Then, I run Xojo alone.

El Capitan 10.11.6 (15G1421), 8GB.

I noticed that Xojo does not like (at all, check drag and drop for example) low memory conditions.

Although I am one of the lucky souls who upgraded and did not have a single issue, that was after testing Sierra on an external drive to make sure everything was OK. As usual.

If you are comfortable with your present configuration, stay with it. Unless you need a version of XCode not supported by EC, or some other imperious reason.

I would strongly suggest, though, you have a VM or an external drive with Sierra on it, to test your software before sending it to the wide wide world. As a growing number of customers will be under Sierra, better make sure everything checks out. There were issues with digital signing, both of executables, and DMG. App Wrapper took care of executables with the usual brilliant work of Sam Rowlands, and should be just fine for DMG. I don’t know, I have been using DMGCanvas for the longest time, and it signs flawlessly as well. I am not sure signing zip is possible at this time.

One fluke I discovered with apps under Sierra is that the vertical slider becomes invisible, apart from the knob. Thanks to Ulrich Bogun, I have a replacement. But yet, I need to test the system version, because that replacement does not work on previous versions. But that is just an example of why it is wise to test software under Sierra before release.

After upgrading to Sierra I couldn’t anymore upload to MAS using Apple’s Application Loader. Uploading thru XCode fixed the problem. But it took me a full day or maybe longer to find this solution.

Application Loader is now part of XCode.

Beside being one OS version late, we will have a brand new macOS version in some months…

So, at some point, we have to go ahead. [I do not know if I have to use :frowning: or :)]

Technically it is, but Sierra only recognizes signed zip files from Apple. No-one else.

[quote=326791:@Emile Schwarz]Beside being one OS version late, we will have a brand new macOS version in some months…

So, at some point, we have to go ahead. [I do not know if I have to use :frowning: or :)][/quote]
I am hoping that Apple are starting to listen to all the complaints and that the next version is purely a bug fix release, with the exception to truly disable some of the several hundred helper applications that are constantly running when no needed, here’s looking at you TouchBarUI helper on a non-touchbar machine!

I suspect that in two years, 10.14, you’ll have to upgrade as Apple won’t accept apps from 10.11 any more.

Just my $0.02 : I’m still on 10.9.5 and able to work with it !
I must admit that I have some external drives with most recent OS, just in case …
I must also admit that I don’t do iOS, as if it was the case I would be under 10.11

No issues with macOS Sierra, Xojo or code signing our apps and installers. That said, with new operating system releases, we do not upgrade, we do clean installs. We do the same for new releases of Windows and Ubuntu. It’s a bit more short-term effort but we avoid the long-term problems resulting from upgrades that are incomplete or buggy. Consider the complexity of upgrading an operating system and all the things that can be missed or go wrong. For our systems and those of our clients, clean installs are generally more stable than those that have been upgraded.

Admittedly not everyone had problems with Sierra, but there appears to be a large volume that does (not a scientific test, just based upon noise levels observed in various Mac orientated forums).

They’re there, you just don’t do anything that shows them. Like the whole PDF debacle https://tidbits.com/article/16966, which according to one dev I’ve spoken to, some of the issues are still are not fixed in 10.12.5!

PDF - How the hell could they screw up PDF, they’ve only been working on PDF for 20 odd years? The answer is that you don’t need that functionality on a Phone…

Or the performance issues reported on this very forum.
https://forum.xojo.com/36786-some-xojo-apps-are-much-slower-on-sierra

Sorry… Going outside for a bit.

“They” waste their time to modify the download UI report (rect on a version, round on another), changing the way the click in the zoom round button (windows) works, etc.

All of that - and much more - at detaching a bunch of engineers at the last minute to do the job…

But all of that are just guesses since I do not works there and so I do not know what happens.

Edit:
Worse: the PDF troubles will probably not be in Sierra, but more certainly in the next macOS version (starting in next June ?).

Which is pretty much in tune with what people are saying; Apple have no product teams anymore. They have one design team; who spend upto 9 months a year working on the next iPhone, then the remaining 3 months is left to tickle the other products.

Without dedicated product teams, how can one expect products to flourish?

I hope not; I truly hope that Apple is actually listening and paying attention to growing unsatisfaction across their products. Sadly I hear a lot of talk from VPs, but as of yet am still waiting to see some solid evidence that Apple are going to focus on products rather than profit.

I saw that in the 1988-1992: some engineers had a “second job” and were working on another product when they had time.
First hand information.

Also:
I still not have information and this is only guess:
IMHO: if the engineers comes with a solution (in the PDF area) say in late May (or so), they will probably roll in these changes in a full OS number (vs a dot something).
I also saw that in the past, but for a minor bug I reported.

Exactly what Steve Jobs warned against : https://youtu.be/-AxZofbMGpM