Don't Install Catalina

DavidScottOrkney · Post by **DavidScottOrkney** » Tue Oct 08, 2019 7:41 am

I see Mac OSX 10.15 Catalina is now out.
I think most of us know that if you want to continue to use PowerCADD you need to wait until next year, when 64bit PowerCADD is released.

I guess you could install PowerCADD on an older OS running on a virtual machine using something like Parallels but that's definitely not one I'm going to try.
David

MWolfe · Post by **MWolfe** » Tue Oct 08, 2019 7:31 pm

I picked up a 1TB Samsung Portable SSD T5 and installed Catalina on that to play (keeping Mojave and PCadd on my internal drive). Works great. It's plenty snappy, and I'm on a late 2013 iMac so the drive probably can't produce max speed.

bdmiller · Post by **bdmiller** » Tue Oct 08, 2019 10:51 pm

Is there any estimate about when next year a Catalina compatible version will be out?

Alfred Scott · Post by **Alfred Scott** » Wed Oct 09, 2019 12:29 pm

David,

Time frame for 64-bit PowerCADD is uncertain; issues are sanity and sobriety, see bug list at www.openclip.net for details, however to put things in perspective there never was more insanity in the PowerCADD world than with the individual who created WildTools 20 years ago. If you ever see him, let me know.

Bozo d’Mountbatten

huc · Post by **huc** » Thu Oct 10, 2019 7:39 am

An alternative - albeit a pain in the arse…

With the APFS file system in Catalina (and Mojave) it's possible to create a partition, sharing the free space between the Catalina and Mojave partitions.
Then just move over what’s good in Catalina, and keep the Mojave (or High Sierra) partitions as fallbacks.

Is that any better or worse than an external hard drive? Probably not and could even have other downsides including impacting available internal hard drive space. However, if data files are stored externally (servers, disk arrays, xtnl hard drives etc) it might be a viable option.

Likely not a practical day to day production setup as it requires a reboot to switch OS's but if there was something overriding reason why Catalina might be needed, or perhaps a new Mac was ordered that it came preinstalled on - it's an option worth keeping in mind.

Just tossing out another option in case folks find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

[EDIT: Just dawned on me running Parallels or VMWare might also work to sandbox and run 32bit apps like PCD9.1.x without requiring a reboot - I haven't tried but did that for ages with various versions of Windows OS on numerous Macs]

Post by **[email protected]** » Fri Oct 11, 2019 8:50 pm

Our expectation at this point is that PowerCADD 10, the 64-bit version, will be available late 2020. PowerCADD 10 will be finally free from all legacy portions of the OS. As such, it will support the modern and evolving interface capabilities of the OS moving forward. The PowerCADD 9 user interface was largely designed in the late 80's and has been due for a redesign for quite some time. The PowerCADD 10 user interface user interface has been redesigned with modern hardware and capabilities in mind, including large Retina screens. We are excited about the user interface and stability advancements going into PowerCADD 10.

In response to Huc, PowerCADD 9 does indeed work well with Mojave virtualization under Parallels and VMWare. We use both Parallels and VMWare in-house running Mojave, inside Catalina.

Todd

BaughbLabs · Post by **BaughbLabs** » Tue Oct 15, 2019 2:50 pm

Todd

Awesome, can't wait.

blshaw45 · Post by **blshaw45** » Mon Oct 21, 2019 4:24 pm

I am a little confused. While the posts here all say that Catalina compatibility must await 64-bit implementation with PowerCADD 10, PowerCADD 9 opens under Mojave without the usual warning about incompatibility and the only PowerCADD reference in Legacy Software in System Administration is 'Usage Statistics'. If, indeed, the only component of PowerCADD that is 32-bit is Usage Statistics, couldn't that be upgraded without re-writing the entire app? Just curious.

Derek · Post by **Derek** » Mon Oct 21, 2019 11:38 pm

You also need to check in the Applications section of the report. Here you will see PowerCADD is not 64 bit:

: Screen Shot 2019-10-22 at 10.35.41 am.png (124.47 KiB) Viewed 28849 times

Howard in Durham · Post by **Howard in Durham** » Tue Oct 22, 2019 12:27 am

Speaking of not installing Catalina, the current Oct 21 issue of Tidbits,
https://tidbits.com/2019/10/21/six-reas ... -so-buggy/
features an article by David Shayer, 18 years an Apple software engineer, about why iOS13 and Catalina are so buggy. Very interesting, well written, and revealing. Considering the current state of Catalina, waiting till later next year is not such a bad idea!