Catalina

Considering purchase of a new Mac. Will XOJO work with Catalina?

Yep. Works fine.

Assuming you are using the latest version of Xojo that is (2019 R2).

Hi @Rebecca Walker and @Garry Pettet, or anyone else,

I just wanted to check in and see what you folks still think of Catalina so far?

My question is less about how Xojo will work, but rather what the overall experience of using Catalina as a development environment is like?

I’m getting a new Mac Mini next week and it’ll come installed with Catalina of course. I’m feeling a little nervous about it because of some less-than-positive experiences/reviews some people have mentioned with it. I’m tempted to just pave over Catalina and put Mojave on it and wait. But at the same time it’s always nice to have a sparkly new OS :slight_smile:

Thanks.

I’m using Catalina on my Mac mini (Late 2012) booting from an external USB 3 SSD. I’m using 2019R3 and it works just fine. Haven’t had any problems at all really with Catalina and I installed it fairly early. My apps are iOS and fairly small so the build times are short. I’ve been thinking about getting a new Mac mini but since I’m still happy with what I have I haven’t pulled the trigger.

2019r1.1 IDE works fine on Catalina.

[quote=468042:@Scott Cadillac]I’m getting a new Mac Mini next week and it’ll come installed with Catalina of course. I’m feeling a little nervous about it because of some less-than-positive experiences/reviews some people have mentioned with it. I’m tempted to just pave over Catalina and put Mojave on it and wait. But at the same time it’s always nice to have a sparkly new OS :slight_smile:

Thanks.[/quote]
Note that you CANNOT put Mojave on some of the brand-new Macs. e.g. the 2019 MBP ships with Catalina and there’s no downgrading.
The reason is that the newer operating systems have new drivers for the new hardware. Older OS’s won’t have the drivers needed.
The rule of thumb is that you cannot go back to an OS that is earlier than the OS that the product was designed for. SOME 2019 Mac products (that are still new, but were built before Catalina came out) can support Mojave, but some will not.

I’ve been researching this fairly heavily as I’d like to ditch my 2016 MBP and get the new 2019 (which will not run Mojave), but I have too many applications that require 32-bit still and I don’t like lugging around 2 machines. I’m still investigating the possibility of running Mojave in a VM under Catalina, but it’s a pretty big hack to make that work, and I don’t know whether my older apps will still work.

Thank you Andy for the comments.

I am aware of this limitation. The same more or less apples to many PC’s because of hardware specific drivers.

But in my case, I’ve ordered a Late 2018 Mac Mini because hardware-wise, there is nothing newer offered by Apple and at the time this particular model was launched, it came with Mojave (so the hardware specific drivers “should” still be available in the Mojave installer). And from the bit of searching/research I’ve done, there are others who have done the same with this model and it works. Worst case scenario, I keep Catalina.

Thanks again. I’ll let you folks know how it works out :slight_smile:

I’m running Mojave on Parallels VM in Catalina (on a 2019 16" MBP), and it works fine. I’m running my ancient 32-bit versions of Quicken and Adobe Dreamweaver in it to avoid paying subscriptions.

Was that difficult?
On VirtualBox it seemed tricky. (I haven’t got a proper Catalina machine to test it on)

Nope. Just a single menu item in Parallels + c. 45 minutes to download and install a new Mojave VM (although in the latest version of Parallels, it might be Catalina).

Purely out of curiosity, what apps do you use that still require 32-bit?

Mostly hardware control software. Manufacturers typically offer these apps for free, so they have little incentive to update their apps for older equipment. Same with drivers for hardware equipment. They are “free” with the hardware, so my cynical side says that if they have a new version of the hardware, it’s in their best interest to stop supporting the old hardware so people will buy the new one. (Apple’s entire philosophy for cynics like me!)