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macOS Catalina (10.15) Compatibility


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5 hours ago, JuanP said:

I received the latest information about the released version of Catalina and Vectorworks, and our R&D team is comfortable with the compatibility of Vectorworks 2019SP5 and 2020SP1. As always, please be cautious with this upgrade and make sure your other critical applications, print drivers, Space Navigators, and other devices are compatible as well before making the move.

 

Thank you for the update. We will be doing some final testing later this week. I will update here if we have problems.

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11 hours ago, helloarchitect said:

Hi guys – any word with VW2018/Catalina compatibility?

 

If you are using Vectorworks 2018 or before, I will not recommend upgrading to Catalina. Even though it seems like version 2018 opens and performs okay in our low-level testing, in the event of a possible compatibility issue on the current released version of Catalina or any future, we do not have any plans on releasing any service pack to address any problems.
 

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Thanks.  Will you be maintaining 2019 during the Catalina cycle?

 

Only reason I ask is that many, many offices have just gotten around to upgrading to 2019 and some find themselves in the difficult position of having to comply with UK's Cyber Essentials regulations where "From 1 October 2014, [the UK] Government requires all suppliers bidding for contracts involving the handling of certain sensitive and personal information to be certified against the Cyber Essentials scheme."

 

Further reading can be found here...

 

https://www.cyberessentials.ncsc.gov.uk

 

It means that anyone wishing to work on government BIM projects using Vectorworks, for example, are likely to have to keep Vectorworks up to date, in order to be considered as a supplier.  Great for the software vendor..., but for the user it is a huge ongoing cost, not only of the software, but the conversion of data and the possible corruption of data when converted.

 

If, through the VSS programme, at least the outgoing version and the incoming version could be maintained and patched to comply with cyber essentials, we can keep projects started in 2019, running in 2019 and thereby reduce the risk of data corruption when converting from one version to the next, which although small, is still a risk.

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PSA

 

MacOS Catalina no longer supports 32-bit Applications.

Discovered this right as I was about to pull the trigger on the upgrade.

Some of our beloved word processing software of the past and nostalgic games will no longer run.

Oh yes, and most old adobe software that is not within the Creative Cloud

HUUUGE news for many production teams.

 

Before you install, do some due diligence:

1. Click on About this Mac under the Apple icon (upper left)

2. Click on System Report (Lower left)

3. Scroll down to Applications under Software

4. Click on Applications and give your system a minute to tally

5. A column to the right can be sorted based on 64 bit

6. Anything that says NO, will be lost and inaccessible after the OS upgrade

7. Do yourself a favor and uninstall these listed programs before your OS upgrade.

Notice many of the 32-bit applications are uninstaller apps. Makes for removing old software a headache when the uninstaller doesn't work 😞

 

 

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I'm not sure if this should be a Catalina post or a Mojave post… It's both really.

 

I spend the weekend with the new VW 2020 working in Mojave on a 12 month old touchbar 15" MacBook Pro. The tiny screen isn't ideal so I changed to a Mac Pro with two 30" Apple monitors also running 2020 and set the MBP to upgrade to Catalina (on an external SSD.)

 

What I found was the normal hatful of rain.

 

VW2020 crashes more than VW2019 on Mojave on either computer. Too much to be acceptable and I'm too busy to bother to bug search for another company who ought to do their own bug fixes before release with a 12 month old OS.

 

VW2020 doesn't work at all well with the Mac Pro and 30" monitors. The screen graphics are woeful but more importantly, there are huge problems with screen refreshes. For example, you can double click on an object to edit it… for example to edit an extrude… and the screen shows the original image with stray handles all over the place so you can't tell if you are in edit mode or not. Heaps of problems along these lines forcing a Z key refresh every time you do a command to make sure you're seeing the right things. 

 

Objects appear to hyperspace, disappearing off-screen and requiring recentring all the time and groups won't ungroup etc.

 

On the same computer, VW 2019 works fine or probably will until I get to work to be told I have used up my registrations and have to send a stamped addressed postcard to VW to de-register an installation.

 

Catalina took all night to install… about 24 hours between connecting an external USB 3 SSD, cloning the original HDD and then updating. The installer sat for hours on 11 minutes remaining. Once that had finished, I found that a handful of key apps… including Aperture (not news there) and all the CS6 Adobe programs wouldn't run, so I disconnected the drive and went back to Mojave and VW2019.

 

I honestly don't understand why VW releases happen like this. Why not release as a beta version for the first 9 months? I think it was May to June before 2019 was stable enough to really use. And for me, not being an architect, there's little reason to use the update anyway and the 3D history 'feature' doesn't appear anywhere, in spite of reading some very vague documentation in the help pages.

 

Not entirely happy! I wonder if my 'service select' (no idea what that actually means in English) program can be delayed by 12 months?

 

D

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16 hours ago, DMcD said:

I'm not sure if this should be a Catalina post or a Mojave post… It's both really.

 

I spend the weekend with the new VW 2020 working in Mojave on a 12 month old touchbar 15" MacBook Pro. The tiny screen isn't ideal so I changed to a Mac Pro with two 30" Apple monitors also running 2020 and set the MBP to upgrade to Catalina (on an external SSD.)

 

What I found was the normal hatful of rain.

 

VW2020 crashes more than VW2019 on Mojave on either computer. Too much to be acceptable and I'm too busy to bother to bug search for another company who ought to do their own bug fixes before release with a 12 month old OS.

 

VW2020 doesn't work at all well with the Mac Pro and 30" monitors. The screen graphics are woeful but more importantly, there are huge problems with screen refreshes. For example, you can double click on an object to edit it… for example to edit an extrude… and the screen shows the original image with stray handles all over the place so you can't tell if you are in edit mode or not. Heaps of problems along these lines forcing a Z key refresh every time you do a command to make sure you're seeing the right things. 

 

Objects appear to hyperspace, disappearing off-screen and requiring recentring all the time and groups won't ungroup etc.

 

On the same computer, VW 2019 works fine or probably will until I get to work to be told I have used up my registrations and have to send a stamped addressed postcard to VW to de-register an installation.

 

Catalina took all night to install… about 24 hours between connecting an external USB 3 SSD, cloning the original HDD and then updating. The installer sat for hours on 11 minutes remaining. Once that had finished, I found that a handful of key apps… including Aperture (not news there) and all the CS6 Adobe programs wouldn't run, so I disconnected the drive and went back to Mojave and VW2019.

 

I honestly don't understand why VW releases happen like this. Why not release as a beta version for the first 9 months? I think it was May to June before 2019 was stable enough to really use. And for me, not being an architect, there's little reason to use the update anyway and the 3D history 'feature' doesn't appear anywhere, in spite of reading some very vague documentation in the help pages.

 

Not entirely happy! I wonder if my 'service select' (no idea what that actually means in English) program can be delayed by 12 months?

 

D

 

OK I'll take the bait... 

 

#1 anyone upgrading to Catalina right now is taking a huge risk with their business (most professionals I work with are perpetually one year behind on macOS, and we have no issues). Furthermore, you're accepting huge trade-offs (no 32-bit apps)... And for what? Subscription services like Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple TV?

 

#2 sounds like you're experiencing graphics hardware issues with old equipment (not the MBP). 2020 really takes advantage of GPU over CPU. My 2014 MBP was choking on 2020 vs 2019. This is a good problem to have because the solution is new hardware that isn't 5+ years old. Easy peasy.

 

#3 VW2020 is probably the most stable .0 and .1 release I've experienced since I've been using it (2011). From the outside looking in, there are signs that they focused on shipping a stable .0 release over packing every single new feature into it at launch (future SP updates will add features).

 

I ran 2019 and 2020 side by side in Sep/Oct, and now that I'm migrating to a new 2019 MBP (and starting new projects), I'll only be installing 2020 SP1.

 

Honestly, holding VW accountable for Apple's nonsense is a losing battle. It's beyond frustrating how many things Apple breaks every year. Us long time Mac users just want them to leave well enough alone.

 

Edited by Mark Aceto
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Almost every release I find that someone calls to say Vectorworks is broken, and it transpires they have just updated their OS after a long history of OS updates dating back to 10.11 or something.

 

Now, in theory, yes, OS updates 'ought' to work, but the reality is never so straightforward.

 

When asking  few more questions we find the Mac in question is old, had multiple users, where all historic accounts are still present, and the Mac has never once since it has been used been reformatted or even had simply house-keying done, like zapping PRAM or resetting SMC, etc, and this stuff is dead easy and requires no IT knowledge whatsoever.

 

So, when someone says, Vectorworks is broken, the first thing to do is uninstall it, and then reinstall it.  If you don't even do that you have no right to moan about Vectorworks.

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HA,

 

First up, the 2020 install I did was a full install on a high spec 2018 MBP running the latest Mojave. I had three or four crashes a day. That's enough for me. In comparison on the same computer, 2019 is very stable and hardly ever bombs (now). 2020 did not have much in the way of speed improvement over 2019 when rotating complex 3D shapes although the compressed save files are nice.

 

The Mac Pro is still a current computer. Yes is old but was high end and at the time of writing, the replacement is not on sale. Comparing the performance of iMacs and the MBP, I'm happy that the Mac Pro outperforms them, especially with 2 x 30" monitors running VW 2019. It's VW2020 which plays up on the same Mac Pro.

 

We develop software and there's no doubt that Mojave was a nightmare for developers and we have been very cross with Apple over this year. However, our software runs on Catalina without any changes. That being said, have no intention of upgrading to Catalina for anything other than testing our software for end users who update by mistake. 

 

It's fine to say reformat but… if VW was the only software I used, then this would be easy. But it's not the only software on the computer and re-downloading a host of Adobe stuff, X-Code, FCP, and all the rest would take close to a week at our internet speeds. Doing a migration of an old OS back to a new install seems to be the worst solution. 

 

BR


D

 

 

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What can I say? I imagine all your software could benefit from a bit of a spring clean. Yes it’s inconvenient but the time you spend doing it will no doubt pay dividends in the future with (hopefully) better performance.

 

the problem is that the engineers at vectorworks would be hard pushed to recreate every environment in which vw is installed and would I imagine expect users to take some steps to create a stable platform upon which to install their software.  In other words it’s not their fault your set up is clearly not conducive to running VW2020. It is working perfectly for so many so I would suggest it would be more helpful to find out what’s causing it to fail on your setup in order that others might benefit from your experience 

 

From my experience reformatting workstations and installing all software again from scratch every 12 months or so improves the user experience no end.

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Hello Shorter.

 

All the other software works fine so why spring clean? No bombs. No lost work. No requirement to change the computer or video card. VW 2019 works fine now. VW 2020 bombs. So I have to completely clean out and reinstall my software just for VW 2020? I can almost guarantee that in 6 months, if I do nothing. VW 2020 will work ok.

 

Quote

the engineers at vectorworks would be hard pushed to recreate every environment in which vw is installed

 

Maybe but then again, that's their job isn't it. I know it is not mine!  But what are the mainstream Mac setups? In fact, what are the recommended setups? Is the Mac Pro on the list? I would expect it is. Is the MBP? I doubt it since most people who spend the day with CAD software need a larger monitor. 

 

Fortunately 2019 works well and 2020 doesn't appear to have enough new features that make it worthwhile changing. I just wish I didn't have to pay for being a beta tester.


D

 

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