Catalina Tips

Please add to this thread if you have any useful tips for using Catalina with your Xojo projects.

Here are a few to get started:

  • Quality: I find catalina (as of beta 3) to be very rough and would not recommend it for a production mac. A surpising amount of bugs considering apple has made this beta public. Recommend you use it on a separate mac for testing.
  • Screen Sharing: My main mac is 10.14, and I wanted to remotely control my Catalina mac using Screen Sharing. However, the catalina mac doesn’t show up in the finder in the “Locations” sidebar. However, if you click Finder/Locations/Network, then the catalina mac does show up, and you can double-click it, at which point you’ll get the “Share Screen” button, which does work.
  • Catlina release notes do exist: https://forum.xojo.com/54751-catalina-beta-3-release-notes
  • There is an apple developer forum for Catalina, but it’s not very popular: https://forums.developer.apple.com/community/beta/macos-1015-beta
  • Catalina is requiring notarization for Apps & DMGs, but only those created after 1 June 2019. Also, this notarization requirement only applies to files that are quarrantined (e.g. files received via download, iMessage, as an email attachment, etc.) See https://forum.xojo.com/54329-dmg-notarising-and-future-macos

All of those points are the primary definition of “BETA”

@Dave S: please read the forum posts on Catalina. The beta is the most awful version of macOS I have ever used and I’m not alone.

I realize that, and that was the point I tried to make… Nobody should ever even consider using BETA software for a production project. I personally never even look at “Betas”… I don’t have the temperment to do what needs to be done, and yet spend time doing QA.

Plus any “tips” would just be workarounds to situations which hopefully would be solved by the time the first Release appears

Maybe you should skip this thread then? :slight_smile:

This did not come true with Mojave. I reported bugs early that Apple did not fix. The knowledge that (A) the bugs had been reported (by me) and (B) Apple was making no efforts to fix them as the betas went along, was important to my planning; the workarounds became the solution by necessity.

ok

I havent tested this, but reportedly you can run Catalina in a VMWare Fusion VM: see https://planetvm.net/blog/?p=64552

Update: Looks like beta5 may fix the problem with SpecialFolder.Trash being nil: https://forum.xojo.com/conversation/post/448059

It’s possible to install Catalina beta on a separate volume on your mac - apparently with APFS it’s much easier since you don’t have to pre-reserve any space. As always, this is dangerous, so backup first. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208891

Precisely because it is a public beta, I have at least one customer who uses it, and since Catalina breaks the Xojo launch mechanism up to 2019R1.1, that is how I found out.

The problem with Apple is not only that they introduce stuff that breaks software, but also they make the system available to end users who don’t know any better, and blame it on the app developer :confused:

Now I am not even sure all my apps will be ready when Catalina becomes the norm.

Don’t you wish that we could get away with what Avid and Adobe do - State that the user must stay with their current working system and not upgrade until given the all-clear?

I wish I could get away with it.

Michel, can you ask your customer to re-test with Catalina beta 5 (just released) when it goes Pubic beta and see if it’s working now? Indications are that they may have fixed all of this. (same question for your own testing).

One thing that’s still not clear to me is whether notarization is required at this point, as long as your developer certificates for application and installer signing haven’t yet expired. Somewhere else, I’d read that the absolute requirement for notarization doesn’t kick in until you need to create new certificates (or, for certificates that were created after June 1).

Another way of putting it: the way I’ve understood it is: as long as your certificates are valid; and they were issued prior to June 1; then you can sign with them as usual but you’re not required to notarize.

Am I right about that?

@Dave Miller: I haven’t gotten any warnings of the type “your app can’t be checked for malicious code” in Mojave. In Catalina I got those for instance for the MBS plugins. So you really want to get your notarization sorted out before Catalina. IMO this is the most stupid warning from Apple I have ever seen.

Will do.

OK. Just tried, f.launch with apps is still broken for apps generated with 2019R1.1 and below.

Guess we will have to wait for R2.

[quote=448286:@Michel Bujardet]OK. Just tried, f.launch with apps is still broken for apps generated with 2019R1.1 and below.

Guess we will have to wait for R2.[/quote]

This is still strange, for me. I don’t have a Catalina bootable set up to test at the moment, but I did, briefly, with Catalina Beta 3. At that time, I was testing some existing applications that launch others, and I didn’t run into problems getting them to work. I don’t think I’m remembering this incorrectly. There are 2 places in an application suite where one launches another with FolderItem.Launch and I’m 99% sure they worked.

You want the app to work in the current version of Catalina, and unfortunately, 2019R1.1 don’t support launching other apps.

2019R2 is probably not that far away, which should alleviate the issue.

[quote=448297:@Michel Bujardet]You want the app to work in the current version of Catalina, and unfortunately, 2019R1.1 don’t support launching other apps.

2019R2 is probably not that far away, which should alleviate the issue.[/quote]
Have you tried the MBS Launch Services functions?

I’ve just ran quick test remote debugging the following code from my Mac running Xojo 2017r3 to an iMac running Catalina beta 5 and it successfully opened a screen shot in Safari.

[code]Dim applicationFolderItem As FolderItem
Dim documentsList(-1) As FolderItem
Dim launchServicesParamsObj As LaunchServicesLaunchParameterMBS
Dim result As FolderItem

'find the application
applicationFolderItem = SpecialFolder.Applications.Child(“Safari.app”)

'add our document to the list we want to open
documentsList.Append(SpecialFolder.Desktop.Child(“Screenshot 2019-06-05 at 10.43.31.png”))

'define the launch parameters
launchServicesParamsObj = New LaunchServicesLaunchParameterMBS
launchServicesParamsObj.Defaults = True
launchServicesParamsObj.Application = applicationFolderItem

'launch
result = LaunchServicesOpenXMBS(documentsList, launchServicesParamsObj)

Break[/code]