VW 2009 and upcoming Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

[Spunkmeyer]

So in your learned opinion, 6 weeks is acceptable?

To do what? I have no information as to the scope of issues, or the number of people involved in fixing whatever problems exist, so I can't intelligently speculate on the optimal schedule. I am not an active employee, beta tester, or contractor for NNA.

And, unless you are one of those, you're just pulling an arbitrary number out of your backside with no context.

NNA says the patch will arrive in November. Case closed. Whether you think it's "acceptable" or not is irrelevant to the issue of releasing the required update.

Were they not given the final build to work with before it was released?

Again, not knowing the scope of issues, when they received it is irrelevant. And as I said before, there are many products that currently require patches to function 100% under Snow Leopard.

For all you know, it's a big task and they've been working on it for months. But my point is... you don't know, and I don't know.

[mike m oz]

Based on what I have read anybody thinking of switching should first find out what the implications are for their printer.

There is always a risk attached to being an early adopter with any OS because there can be problems with both programs and or peripherals. Better to be a little prudent and wait until the dust settles.

[andrewbirch]

Regardless of what NNA's master plan is for November - be it a rollout of 2010 and an updated 2009, or just an updated 2009, its another sign of a software company out of step with its user base and Mac market.

Snow Leopard has been in development for quite a long time, and other products in the same market space are running just fine, certainly not waiting for 10 weeks. For those of us still running earlier versions, the incompatibility is inexcusable.

...its a powerful indication that the Mac CAD market needs better than Vectorworks.

[IanH]

I don't think its an unreasonable amount of time. To know of compatibility you first need to test.

When I worked in software development, our test/release cycle was about 10 weeks - 4 weeks system/regression test, 4 weeks partner systems tests/parallel with 4 weeks user tests, 2 weeks lockdown/last minute patches. Ours was a much larger system than VW but we also probably had more people working on it. So lets assume, without knowing the NNA setup, that release cycle is the same duration. The other unknowns are whether the 2009 testing could run in parallel with 2010 testing - it would not be unreasonable if it would not so had to run as to not impact with the schedule of the 2010 release.

Bearing in mind that any bug found has the potential to invalidate testing done so far and cause the test cycle to be restarted, it is not unreasonable to wait until a stable/final 10.6 version is available otherwise you would simply end up having to go through the test cycle multiple times. It is a waste of time and resources to work with moving goalposts. To be honest though, for a bug fix to an OS change, you could probably mitigate the impact of the fix so that the risk to the release deadline was low, but that does not change the fact that to find bugs with 10.6 the system has to be tested and fixed and retested and that a change in 10.6 would impact and possibly invalidate significant amounts of testing done so far.

The time frame offered by NNA is, IMHO certainly not unreasonable for a complex commercial product.

[mike m oz]

Adobe must also be out of step as well then Andrew.

Q. Will older versions of Adobe creative software?such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 or Macromedia? Studio 8 software?support Mac OS X

Snow Leopard (v10.6)?

A. Older versions of Adobe creative software were not included in our testing efforts. While older Adobe and Macromedia applications may install and run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may therefore experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6).

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/files/Adobe-SnowLeopard_FAQ.pdf

Have you considered the possibility that making older versions compatible simply involves too much work.

NNA will have two versions which are Snow Leopard compatible which is fairly good.

[alina07]

I just installed Snow Leopard on a MacBookPro, and installed some other software (adobe, cinema4d, etc...) just to test it before compromising a general update on daily work computers.

I installed VW 2009 sp4 and it opened ok. I was able to draw some simple 2d, change views, everything basically ok. I was able to open a big file and move around, save, draw some 3d, render in opengl, also ok. In fact i felt it faster an more responsive, snappy.

VW crashed always when importing a dwg

VW crashed once after a boolean -substracting two solids- (but it also crashed there ocacionally in leopard)

It was not an exhaustive test, just a 20 minutes going around, and i will not upgrade to SnowLeopard in my other macs until NNA ensures a fully compatible version of VW, but at first sight, its not as bad as I thought after reading the technical bulletin stating the stability concerns...

MacBookPro, 2.9 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4Mb Ram, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT 512MB, Mac OsX 10.6

Vectorworks Architect 2009 SP4

Edited August 30, 2009 by alina07

[rb-arch]

I just installed Snow Leopard on a MacBookPro, and installed some other software (adobe, cinema4d, etc...) just to test it before compromising a general update on daily work computers.

I installed VW 2009 sp4 and it opened ok. I was able to draw some simple 2d, change views, everything basically ok. I was able to open a big file and move around, save, draw some 3d, render in opengl, also ok. In fact i felt it faster an more responsive, snappy.

VW crashed always when importing a dwg

VW crashed once after a boolean -substracting two solids- (but it also crashed there ocacionally in leopard)

It was not an exhaustive test, just a 20 minutes going around, and i will not upgrade to SnowLeopard in my other macs until NNA ensures a fully compatible version of VW, but at first sight, its not as bad as I thought after reading the technical bulletin stating the stability concerns...

Edit: snow leopard has screwed up all the menus on the left side of the screen, it has piled all the icons in "dimension" on top of eachother.....weird. Will wait until November for the iMac!

MacBookPro, 2.9 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4Mb Ram, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT 512MB, Mac OsX 10.6

Vectorworks Architect 2009 SP4

Any more feedback? I am so tempted to update my iMac - I have the Snow Leopard disk sitting on my desk. It seems to work well on my laptop, but it just crashed while I was importing a jpeg to sheet layer..........

Edited September 8, 2009 by rb-arch

[AN Design]

Have 4 1 TB drives on my mac pro 2x2.26 QuadCore Xeon w/ 16GB Ram

Drives 1&2 are mirrored w/OSX 10.5.8 running VW2009 Designer w/Renderworks

Drives 3&4 are Mirrored w/OSX 10.6 running VW2009 Designer w/ Renderworks

I use AAsync to keep my projects up to date and in sync on the drives.

I boot up in Leopard 10.5.8 in order to import a DWG file into VW and save that file.

I then Reboot under Snow Leopard 10.6 ,VW is running 98% fine, but much faster, than on the leopard system, a few hiccups occasionally but snappy.

I only reboot now when I need to bring in a DWG file

The 10.6 is so much faster when I render and I rarely get the beach ball.

VW also runs much faster on my MacBook Air which is now only OSX10.6

This is my road machine and I see no need to take it back to 10.5.8

If you have a second bay, extra internal drives are cheap. Get one. It also can be a

life saver if your primary drive has issues. Just be sure to Sync your Files on both drives w/ most recent version. And have a external drive for total backups.

[AN Design]

Forgot to mention that I also have VW 2008 on both systems as well.

VW2008 does not have the issue w/ DWG files w/ snow leopard, but opening the file into 2009 will crash it most of the time. That is why I reboot.

[rb-arch]

I have an iMac (main machine) and a Macbook Pro which has s.leopard and VW2009. It works fine, except the icons in the menus collapse on top of each other in bizarre fashion.

For that reason, I have decided to wait until November for the update - I can't afford to have 2 quirky machines!

[BiztroBill]

Hi, everyone. I installed Snow Leopard last night and now I wish I had checked with this group before. No problems so far with any applications other than VW.

I haven't had crashes like some here have reported but display is quirky. When I select an object and then mouse over the menu or a tool palette the screen fades to gray and sort of pulses at a roughly 2 second cycle. I'm still able to edit and draw and the display clears up as soon as I unselect the object and refresh the screen (by zooming with mouse scroll).

If it doesn't get worse I might be able to limp through this until there is a fix from NNA. Otherwise, I might have to try changing OS back to 10.5?

Has anyone else experienced this?

[Stan Rostas]

Vectorworks 2009 does not work well at all on Snow Leopard. The fix will not be for another 2 months at least if that aids in your decision.

[rb-arch]

2 months! Better not be 2 months. They said early November, and haven't updated the bulletin.

[Stan Rostas]

2 months! Better not be 2 months. They said early November, and haven't updated the bulletin.

rb-arch, I believe you have given yourself your answer, early November is two months from early september but not sure.

[rb-arch]

:blush:

[Bob Holtzmann]

For me, that two month delay also applies to a VwA 2010 upgrade, because I want to have both 2009 and 2010 versions running under Snow Leopard (which is sitting on the shelf).

I could run VwA 2010 under Leopard 10.5.8, but then it won't have that advertised SL speed boost.

By the way, I noticed that NNA can take U.S.A. orders via secure webpage.