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Thread: Mac OS Catalina

  1. #1
    Grand Master dkpw's Avatar
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    Mac OS Catalina

    I've taken an unusual step, and installed the just released Mac OS 10.15 codename Catalina, rather than waiting a few weeks.

    There are some differences especially if you have other Apple environment devices, as you can now use iPod apps on your Mac. There's new media apps, Music replaces iTunes, Apple TV, Podcasts etc. plus the usual security updates.

    If, as I do, you just use Macs and not iPhones or iPads etc. there's not that much which is new. Beware though it's an 8GB upgrade!

    https://www.apple.com/uk/macos/catalina/features/

  2. #2
    Grand Master thieuster's Avatar
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    On my MacBook since yesterday. I can't notice any difference

  3. #3
    if you use photoshop, Lightroom, capture-one or Wacom tablets DO NOT UPGRADE. lots of issues and non working features/tools.
    if you rely on your mac for work with any third party software then i wouldn’t upgrade either as there is no going back, 32bit software will be unusable.

    let the early adopters have all the issues, downtime and lost revenue until everything has been fixed.

  4. #4
    Make sure you download and run Go64 before upgrading. It will scan your system for 32-bit apps.

    https://www.stclairsoft.com/Go64/

    Make sure you check critical hardware such as printers and scanners too.

    Finally be prepared for lots of warning dialogs when you start for the first time. Every app that accessed Documents, Desktop and Downloads requires permission to access them. I’ve seen examples of 10+ dialogs appearing on first boot. This is as bad as Vista was for security warning messages.

  5. #5

    Hello

    Phil,

    Do you suggest leaving it a while then?

    Best,

    Ben

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by burnside View Post
    Phil,

    Do you suggest leaving it a while then?

    Best,

    Ben
    Definitely. If your computer is running well there is no reason to upgrade immediately. I don’t plan on updating my 2012 MacBook Pro for at least 3 months.

  7. #7
    Grand Master Chris_in_the_UK's Avatar
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    Well, mine is fine.

    A couple of 'permissions' pop ups but once acknowledged all is well.

    Speedy and no issues so far.
    When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........

  8. #8

    Hello

    Phil,

    Think I'll leave it for a bit then.

    Best,

    Ben

  9. #9
    Master sean's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Lee View Post
    there is no reason to upgrade immediately.
    Getting rid of these may prove to be one. :(



    The one on the right is Catalina, the one of the left is iMovie, which won't update without Catalina.

  10. #10
    I upgraded yesterday, since then done a lot of work and not found any problems so far.

    R
    Ignorance breeds Fear. Fear breeds Hatred. Hatred breeds Ignorance. Break the chain.

  11. #11
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    Ive had the Beta on for months and use the Adobe Photoshop and Creative Site packages no problem.

    Haven’t had any dramas with it bearing in mind I was using the beta which isn’t always great at all except initially WhatsApp desktop didn’t work but does now. All the apps will catch up fast.
    RIAC

  12. #12
    They've made a right mess of syncing audio to iDevices via finder

  13. #13
    Grand Master Dave E's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nogbad The Bad View Post
    They've made a right mess of syncing audio to iDevices via finder
    I'm not looking forward to trying to synch my iPod based on what I've read. Other than that, I made the switch yesterday and all seems fine. A few permission pop-ups at first, but other than that nothing really noticeable.
    Dave E

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  14. #14
    Craftsman
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    Be aware that the download and install can take an age. Lots of users, me included, had the install “hang” And had to take the risky step of turning the machine off mid-install because nothing else works. Works fine now but it was a wasted morning.

  15. #15
    Grand Master thieuster's Avatar
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    Synchronising with my other Apple devices took a while (few days, in fact). Now all's okay.

  16. #16
    Grand Master learningtofly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris_in_the_UK View Post
    Well, mine is fine.

    A couple of 'permissions' pop ups but once acknowledged all is well.

    Speedy and no issues so far.
    Ditto - Photoshop is working fine, too.

    That said, Phil's advice always seems spot on.

  17. #17
    Lightroom fine for me, and FCP X (presumbly a recent automatic update) wouldn't open before I took the new OS.

  18. #18
    Craftsman
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    I needed to restart my MacBook Air as it was stuck on “setting up” for hours

  19. #19
    Master Toshk's Avatar
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    I installed it on 5 machines over the last week with no problems whatsoever. First macOS to fully support our old printer on release day.

  20. #20
    Master Thewatchbloke's Avatar
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    Updated during the week but I had to upgrade to office365 first as office2011 was flagged as being incompatible. I’ve also lost Photoshop CS6 but can’t make my mind up what to use instead. It seems Photoshop is now quite an expensive subscription service so I may reinstall Gimp. I use an iMac Pro for work and although it was very quick anyway it does seem even quicker now, although I agree that could just be the placebo effect!

  21. #21
    Grand Master learningtofly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thewatchbloke View Post
    Updated during the week but I had to upgrade to office365 first as office2011 was flagged as being incompatible. I’ve also lost Photoshop CS6 but can’t make my mind up what to use instead. It seems Photoshop is now quite an expensive subscription service so I may reinstall Gimp. I use an iMac Pro for work and although it was very quick anyway it does seem even quicker now, although I agree that could just be the placebo effect!
    I pay £8 per month for half a dozen Creative Cloud apps that include Photoshop and Lightroom, Duncan. That doesn't seem expensive to me.
    Last edited by learningtofly; 13th October 2019 at 10:32.

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by learningtofly View Post
    I pay £8 per month for half a dozen Creative Cloud apps that include Photoshop and Lightroom, Duncan. That doesn't seem expensive to me.
    Likewise I have the full package at £40 or whatever it is and is brilliant and worth the money in my opinion.
    RIAC

  23. #23
    Master Thewatchbloke's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by learningtofly View Post
    I pay £8 per month for half a dozen Creative Cloud apps that include Photoshop and Lightroom, Duncan. That doesn't seem expensive to me.
    Have you got a link please Tony? I don't mind £8 per month but when I looked I couldn't find one that cheap!

  24. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by Thewatchbloke View Post
    Have you got a link please Tony? I don't mind £8 per month but when I looked I couldn't find one that cheap!
    It’s £9.98 per month for the Creative Cloud Photography plan:

    https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/plans.html

  25. #25
    Grand Master learningtofly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thewatchbloke View Post
    Have you got a link please Tony? I don't mind £8 per month but when I looked I couldn't find one that cheap!
    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Lee View Post
    It’s £9.98 per month for the Creative Cloud Photography plan:

    https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/plans.html
    Yes, that's what I'm on but I'm only paying £8.32 pm... it must be an older subscription that they're continuing to honour.

  26. #26
    Grand Master Dave E's Avatar
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    Seems a bit slower to reconnect my wireless keyboard when I wake it up from lock screen, but that's the only big difference I've noticed so far.
    Dave E

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  27. #27
    Master Thewatchbloke's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Lee View Post
    It’s £9.98 per month for the Creative Cloud Photography plan:

    https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/plans.html
    That's the cheapest plan I could find which takes it over my psychological £100pa limit. I rarely edit photographs as such but I do batch resize them every day, and at almost £120pa just for resizing photos I can't really justify the expense, even at £100 I was questioning it. I'll reinstall gimp for the odd bit of editing and use PhotoResize pro for my batch resizing, for a one off payment of £2.99 it does the job very well.

    What's the deal with the Creative Cloud Photography 20gb limit? Does that mean if you edit over £20gb of photos per annum you have to pay more or can you store unlimited images locally, the blurb didn't make it very clear?

  28. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thewatchbloke View Post
    That's the cheapest plan I could find which takes it over my psychological £100pa limit. I rarely edit photographs as such but I do batch resize them every day, and at almost £120pa just for resizing photos I can't really justify the expense, even at £100 I was questioning it. I'll reinstall gimp for the odd bit of editing and use PhotoResize pro for my batch resizing, for a one off payment of £2.99 it does the job very well.

    What's the deal with the Creative Cloud Photography 20gb limit? Does that mean if you edit over £20gb of photos per annum you have to pay more or can you store unlimited images locally, the blurb didn't make it very clear?
    I moved over to Skylum Luminar as I was fed up as paying a monthly subscription when I didn’t use it that much. It’s about £70 one off payment and Luminar 4 is due out anytime now. I think it does what you need it for.
    ps the 20gb limit is online storage so you can process as many photos as you want if stored locally.

  29. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by learningtofly View Post
    Yes, that's what I'm on but I'm only paying £8.32 pm... it must be an older subscription that they're continuing to honour.
    that's the ex.VAT price

  30. #30
    Grand Master learningtofly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by fordy964 View Post
    that's the ex.VAT price
    Ah, okay. I’m pretty sure my invoices are tax exempt, possibly because I pay through my business.

  31. #31
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    Quote Originally Posted by MrSmith View Post
    if you use photoshop, Lightroom, capture-one or Wacom tablets DO NOT UPGRADE. lots of issues and non working features/tools.
    if you rely on your mac for work with any third party software then i wouldn’t upgrade either as there is no going back, 32bit software will be unusable.

    let the early adopters have all the issues, downtime and lost revenue until everything has been fixed.
    Thanks for that. I noticed the upgrade, but use Lightroom a lot.


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  32. #32
    Acorn is an excellent image editor which is currently on sale.

    https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

  33. #33
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    I'm missing the dashboard or whatever it was called, where I used to be able to swipe to another desktop with calculator and currency converters etc.

  34. #34
    Quote Originally Posted by ac82 View Post
    I'm missing the dashboard or whatever it was called, where I used to be able to swipe to another desktop with calculator and currency converters etc.
    That was removed from Catalina. It used a lot of 32-bit tech so wouldn’t work without a lot of work.

  35. #35
    Master Thewatchbloke's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Lee View Post
    Acorn is an excellent image editor which is currently on sale.

    https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
    That looks very good Phil, thanks. I’ll download the trial and give it a go.

  36. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by Thewatchbloke View Post
    I rarely edit photographs as such but I do batch resize them every day
    For just resizing (not cropping etc.) you might want to look into sips, which is built-in on the MacOS command-line. For example:

    Code:
    sips -Z 800 *.jpg
    That will resize all the jpg images in the current directory to be a maximum of 800 pixels horizontally or vertically. It writes the result to the same file, so I find the easiest way to process a batch is just copy the originals before running it. You do have to be a bit careful though or you can lose your originals easily. You can make it output new files, but requires a bit of scripting, so not usually worth the hassle.

    All the options here: https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/sips/
    More, friendly examples here: https://coderwall.com/p/ekhe8g/batch...-mac-with-sips

  37. #37
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    What happens to iTunes? I know it’s crap, but I’ve got all my music in iTunes which I use to sync to iPods and iPhones and also to play through Sonos

  38. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by berin View Post
    What happens to iTunes? I know it’s crap, but I’ve got all my music in iTunes which I use to sync to iPods and iPhones and also to play through Sonos
    iTunes functionality has been split up. TV and films are in the TV app, podcasts are in the Podcasts app and audiobooks are in the Books app.

    Music is now in the Music app. It uses a different database format from iTunes so third party apps that rely on reading this database no longer work. This has affected a lot of DJ apps.

    Syncing with iPods and iPhones is now in Finder. When you connect the device, it appears in the Finder sidebar. Click on the device to access the syncing menu which has the same layout as before. You can select which music, video and photos sync over there.

    I don’t think it will affect your Sonos. When you setup your Sonos music library, you don’t point it at an iTunes library, you point it at the Music folder on your computer. This will be in the same place so shouldn’t be affected. Looking at the Sonos documentation, it appears the Sonos app reads the iTunes XML database to get playlists. As I mentioned before, this XML file no longer exists so Sonos will have to update their software to read the new database format. I haven’t tested any of this though as I keep my local music on a NAS for my Sonos speakers to play.
    Last edited by Phil Lee; 18th October 2019 at 10:59.

  39. #39
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    Thanks for that, Phil. I use a NAS too, currently DS415play but just ordered a ds918+. Sonos does point to the music library on the NAS, to a folder where I sync iTunes.

    Is this a good time to move media to Plex?

  40. #40
    Grand Master dkpw's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thewatchbloke View Post
    That looks very good Phil, thanks. I’ll download the trial and give it a go.
    Duncan, you could also have a look at GraphicConverter which is a long standing Mac image processing tool, which combines editing with batch processing, inc. resizing, renaming, format changing etc.

    D

  41. #41
    Grand Master dkpw's Avatar
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    And Apple have already released a supplemental update to Catalina. :)

  42. #42
    Craftsman
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    It has completely destroyed search on my mailboxes in the mail app. Most frustrating!

  43. #43
    Master .olli.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thewatchbloke View Post
    I'll reinstall gimp for the odd bit of editing and use PhotoResize pro for my batch resizing
    I use a Gimp plugin for batch editing (including resizing) called "Batch Image Manipulation Plugin 1.18"
    If you are already used to GIMP it might be worth a go, keeps it all under one open source roof!

  44. #44
    Grand Master Dave E's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dave E View Post
    I'm not looking forward to trying to synch my iPod based on what I've read. Other than that, I made the switch yesterday and all seems fine. A few permission pop-ups at first, but other than that nothing really noticeable.
    I was right not to look forward to it. It's a bit crappy.

    First time you synch, you have to let it erase everything and synch from scratch. That in itself is kind of dumb. However, I did it and all worked fine. I've just gone to synch a new playlist to it, though, and managed to erase everything and only synch the playlist. Now re-synching the whole thing again....
    Dave E

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  45. #45
    Grand Master Dave E's Avatar
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    Actually, synching an iPod is even crappier than I thought. I hooked up my iPod to add a couple of new albums to it and I'm now sitting waiting for it to completely resynch from scratch.

    First alternative is that I accidentally managed to delete the entire contents of my iPod, which means it's a massively stupid and unintuitive piece of software, because that's certainly not what I intended to do.

    Second alternative is that you need to resynch your whole library from scratch any time you add any music.

    Either of these alternatives are rubbish.
    Dave E

    Skating away on the thin ice of a new day

  46. #46
    Craftsman ajdh's Avatar
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    I had a second update to Catalina today. Several apps no longer work and I'm having to use my phone to sync my fitbit.

  47. #47
    Master jukeboxs's Avatar
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    Ah yes, that is rather annoying - I've now lost my old MS Office. Bugger !

  48. #48
    Craftsman ajdh's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jukeboxs View Post
    Ah yes, that is rather annoying - I've now lost my old MS Office. Bugger !
    Try Apache Open Office. It's free and not a bad Office alternative.

  49. #49
    Craftsman
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    Mac OS Catalina

    Quote Originally Posted by craig1912 View Post
    I moved over to Skylum Luminar as I was fed up as paying a monthly subscription when I didn’t use it that much. It’s about £70 one off payment and Luminar 4 is due out anytime now. I think it does what you need it for. .
    I’m now using Luminar as well - although normally Luminar Flex as a PS Lightroom plug in. It’s a fantastic tool for editing but Luminar 3’s cataloging isn’t quite there yet. I’m on LR6 which is the last version before Adobe went over to subscriptions. I won’t take up a subscription unless I’ve no option. I know it’s not all that expensive at the moment but there are rumours of big price rises in the pipeline.

    My problem is that Adobe will not upgrade LR6 so that the compatibility issues with Catalina won’t be addressed. I’ll stay with High Sierra for now - but my IMac is 10 years old and will need to be replaced eventually. I just hope that Luminars cataloging is up to Lightrooms standard by then.

  50. #50
    Master jukeboxs's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ajdh View Post
    Try Apache Open Office. It's free and not a bad Office alternative.
    Thanks for that, I'll give it a look.

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