Help Please! Situation has suddenly gotten serious.

[Rob]

Hey Folks!

I've been a PowerCADD user for about 20 years now. About 8-10 years ago when Apple started breaking backwards compatibility, and the real estate crash was hitting my company, I moved away from Apple, so my Mac-Fu is both rusty and out of date. However, I kept my PPC chip OSX 10.4 tower with PCadd 7 and WT 8 on it for drawing, and I stashed an intel chip OSX 10.5 mac mini from my old company for the eventual day that the tower died, so I could keep working for an interim period at least.

Well that 10.4 tower finally died yesterday after a run so long it clearly didn't owe anyone anything... A moment of silence for the quality of that machine, godspeed buddy... and now I'm working on a venerable mac mini that hadn't been booted up in several years. Luckily it did still work, but I don't regard this as a long term solution... and if/when this mini dies, I have very little possibility of continuing to find such old operating systems/hardware, and I don't think much of the long term reliability of the minis anyway. Plus I'd love to upgrade anyway. My drawing machine being able to actually use a web browser and dropbox again would be great.

So I know PCadd 9 can't install on the last two operating systems for Apple, and some googling tells me if I want to upgrade now, I have to get PCadd 9, and something like a 4-5 year old Imac Pro and that would be about all I could do to get a mac with Mojave on it, the last OS it was compatible with, I think? And I can't tell if there even is a version of WildTools for PCadd 9 at all?

I'm not too excited about going out of my way to set myself up to be 5 years obsolete from the get go. It would be so much better if I could get a newer computer, operating system, PCadd and Wildtools.

I need help figuring out what to do!

Does anyone have any idea what kind of timeline we're on for a version that is actually compatible with newer Mac OS's? If we're talking a few months I would be so bummed if I locked into the obsolete stuff now. If we're talking a year I'd sigh and do it anyway, and I guess my leap to the future will be set back a few years.

Am I correct that to run PCadd 9 I need to look at elderly mac hardware, or is there anyone who knows a way to put the old operating system on a newer machine, so I could just upgrade the OS when it's time to go to PCadd 10? Has anyone does this and found it stable?

Is there really no wildtools for PCadd 9? Or am I just missing something?

[Alfred Scott]

Rob,

For WildTools, visit WildTools updates in the PowerCADD Help menu and download the current WildTools 10.6.

I have something called Bozo Technology, which is a mechanism to cause users to update to the current shipping version when we have a new version for sale. The tools have yellow icons and have the obnoxious behavior of placing duplicate objects with a 4X pen size and squiggled lines.

Alfred

[Rob]

Thanks Alfred! I thought I posted a reply already, but it seems to have dissapeared.

First off... thank you for all you've done with WildTools. What a great toolset, it's really enhanced my life, and glad to see you're still at it.

I see now I was confused because the store layout has changed. I used to see PC and WT side by side under featured, I guess, and now I had to dig a bit further, but I see it now and all is well with the world.

Seeing that and seeing the upgrade bundles has dissolved a lot of my fear. I ordered a 2018 mini on the cheap, so I can upgrade to PC9/WT10 ASAP at this point, and after PC10/WT11 is available I'll invest in a real, up to date rig and get current. In the meantime, my drawing machine will finally be able to use a browser and dropbox again, so that will be amazing