For them out is not just a simple checkbox in Xcode. Based on its age and history I am 99.9% sure that this is a Carbon app, which would be C or C++ and Carbon API. No objective-C or Swift. No Cocoa. No switch in Xcode for 64 bit.
Apple did not make a 64 bit Carbon ever. So they are basically stuck with starting from scratch. Carbon and Cocoa are so different that there is probably very little code that can be re-used.
While Carbon was deprecated long ago, Catalina is the first macOS/OS X release to totally drop support for it.
Unless they were to basically start from scratch they really have no good choice.
yeh if you have a complex app written in carbon and it is too difficult to port then you are doomed. However they have decades to fix that, and just didn't. As long as the money is incoming I suppose.
From a financial perspective, hosted solutions make more sense. But eventually, a cloud native solution makes better sense for everyone. Besides single code base to develop and maintain, you also don't worry about variation of hardware, fewer OS versions, or even virus or software conflicts. Plus end-user support such as installations and migration, and even package distributions cost a lot of money.
30 years ago, when the computer industry was still growing, companies can rely solely on new package sales. But today the computer industry is mostly for replacements, there is just not enough customers to justify new versions every couple of years.
For them out is not just a simple checkbox in Xcode. Based on its age and history I am 99.9% sure that this is a Carbon app, which would be C or C++ and Carbon API. No objective-C or Swift. No Cocoa. No switch in Xcode for 64 bit.
Apple did not make a 64 bit Carbon ever. So they are basically stuck with starting from scratch. Carbon and Cocoa are so different that there is probably very little code that can be re-used.
While Carbon was deprecated long ago, Catalina is the first macOS/OS X release to totally drop support for it.
Unless they were to basically start from scratch they really have no good choice.
I looked at some of their YouTube videos and it looks like it’s a java application. The windows/panels seem to have that effect.
It is super clear that they are using this as an excuse to funnel their customers to the subscription model. That gives them a consistent income source in perpetuity and effectively one less codebase to worry about. The only reason they even offer the first option is likely because the tax tables are platform independent and it doesn't require any additional effort.
There should be no pride pointing toward a 30 year old codebase, just think of all of the optimizations their software is surely missing out on as it currently stands.
I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad.
Apple has done an exceptional job transitioning from one architecture to the next. They gave developers LOTS of time to transition. This is not a fault of Apple or macOS in any way. This is a fault of the developers of AccountEdge not keeping their codebase updated as time goes on. They hung onto old code "that worked" and now this latest transition has become a roadblock for them.
I'm a software engineer that has moved my own in-house framework forward over 15 years from PHP 3 to 4 to 5, and now to 7, so I know how "keeping with the times" is really beneficial at the end of the day. The AccountEdge developers failed to do that.
But they do offer a cloud version, so Catalina users are not left out to dry completely. And Windows runs great on a Mac, if the budget allows it. There are options to get around this unfortunate situation.
I'd honestly forgotten MYOB existed. That can't be good for the company.
Accounting has largely moved to SAAS models allowing for multiple OS environments and distributed offices. Intuit Canada has long ignored making Quicken Home and Business available to Mac users. The leaders here are Quickbooks Online, Xero and FreshBooks. Wave Accounting is free. The Mac App Store has a whole page of Accounting software options.
In this environment, the developer's probably right. Does it make any sense to spend time recoding this 30-year-old software? No.
Let me tell you something about Xero. I was researching a replacement for AccountEdge about 18 months ago. Xero had a 30 day trial plastered all over their web site that included a 'free' online conversion from MYOB to Xero (upload / download). Turned out 'free' didn't apply if you were using AccountEdge for Mac in which case the conversion was $200 before you could start the 30-day trial. I communicated what I thought of that to Xero and Quickbooks Online got my subscription.
Guess I have to hope my 2013 MBA lasts as long as my business. I have 12 years of books in an entire business system based on this app.
And as the president, owner, CEO and amateur accountant, I'm in no mood to learn a new bookkeeping system, migrate all of my books, and create a whole new work flow in my spare time...
I got a communication from the company before Catalina came out saying that the program was not going to run on it, but that I could expect a 64 bit replacement not too long in the future.
maybe Not dying but certainly under a lot of stress. The entire hardware line up is pretty pathetic. Even the new Mac Pro, as nicely engineered as it is has very limited appeal. The rest of the hardware line up goes far to long without serious updates. The iMacs have become embarrassingly bad values and have some of the slowest secondary storage shipping in modern hardware. I have no idea what the laptop line is suppose to be but every year you get less for your money.
On the flip side I actually like that Mac OS is mature and doesn’t change radically every year. A stable OS is a good thing. But even here Mac OS could use more attention than it is getting.
So yeah a troll but on the other hand the Mac platform is in a pathetic state if you consider it objectively.
I’m actually in agreement with you about most of the above. I just don’t see the platform as in quite the same pathetic state. Not yet. Getting there. I’m particularly irritated about the lack of a midrange Mac Pro myself, but average users are still doing okay with what Apple has on offer. That’s actually why the “pro haters” act like nobody needs anything but an iMac and cannot comprehend why an iMac Pro isn’t acceptable for heavy workloads.
Something that really bugged me recently was finding that the storage on my Mac was mostly taken up with System files, as I could see from About this Mac -> Manage Storage.
My own documents and files were 75GB and the System 150Gb. What was that? Hard to tell, some people say online that it is a bug as most of the applications in Application are assumed to be in the System folder. Fine, if still a UI bug ( regardless of who owns the /Application folder) . Anyway I deleted some of those.
Not much savings, maybe 1-2Gb..
I still haven't worked out what most of this is but I did delete from ~/Library/Caches some older caches from more than 6 months ago. Freed up 50GB. There's still 120Gb used by the system, of which 75GB is definitely mine, leaving me with 55 Gb of usable.
Its not kernel or essential stuff like that I suppose as my total usable space is 250Gb not 256Gb, as reported.
Here's an interesting post I found from 2013 about AE's code:
"The backend of AEP, the part that implements the accounting rules and database, is not too bad, but the user interface is terrible. It is all based on Classic Mac APIs which Apple deprecated a decade ago. Worse, it doesn't even use those APIs in a reasonable way. Most, if not all, windows are implemented as Classic Mac dialogs which has many disadvantages. No more than one window of any type (invoice, bank register, etc.) can be open at any one time. There is a maximum of around a dozen windows of all types that can be open at one time. Worse, many things that you think are menus (e.g., selecting a vendor) are really dialogs so you may be several levels deep in dialogs and have to back out and close something because you can't select from something you think of as a menu. Some of the dialogs (like transaction recap) are even modal dialogs and lock up the whole application. The file handling APIs that it uses are also ancient history. One side effect of this is that it doesn't support long file names. You're still stuck with the old Classic Mac limit that went away for most apps a decade ago (was it 31 characters? I forget). Even new features suffer from this. If you try to attach a file to an entry (a new feature in the current version) it fails if the file's name is longer than the MacOS 9 limit. If you try to open an accounts file with a long name you get nothing but a beep, not even an error message. It's too bad that an otherwise reasonable program is so crippled by a bad user interface."
Comments
30 years ago, when the computer industry was still growing, companies can rely solely on new package sales. But today the computer industry is mostly for replacements, there is just not enough customers to justify new versions every couple of years.
Apple has done an exceptional job transitioning from one architecture to the next. They gave developers LOTS of time to transition. This is not a fault of Apple or macOS in any way. This is a fault of the developers of AccountEdge not keeping their codebase updated as time goes on. They hung onto old code "that worked" and now this latest transition has become a roadblock for them.
I'm a software engineer that has moved my own in-house framework forward over 15 years from PHP 3 to 4 to 5, and now to 7, so I know how "keeping with the times" is really beneficial at the end of the day. The AccountEdge developers failed to do that.
But they do offer a cloud version, so Catalina users are not left out to dry completely. And Windows runs great on a Mac, if the budget allows it. There are options to get around this unfortunate situation.
Something that really bugged me recently was finding that the storage on my Mac was mostly taken up with System files, as I could see from About this Mac -> Manage Storage.
My own documents and files were 75GB and the System 150Gb. What was that? Hard to tell, some people say online that it is a bug as most of the applications in Application are assumed to be in the System folder. Fine, if still a UI bug ( regardless of who owns the /Application folder) . Anyway I deleted some of those.
Not much savings, maybe 1-2Gb..
I still haven't worked out what most of this is but I did delete from ~/Library/Caches some older caches from more than 6 months ago. Freed up 50GB. There's still 120Gb used by the system, of which 75GB is definitely mine, leaving me with 55 Gb of usable.
Its not kernel or essential stuff like that I suppose as my total usable space is 250Gb not 256Gb, as reported.
This is a really big issue I think.
"The backend of AEP, the part that implements the accounting rules and database, is not too bad, but the user interface is terrible. It is all based on Classic Mac APIs which Apple deprecated a decade ago. Worse, it doesn't even use those APIs in a reasonable way. Most, if not all, windows are implemented as Classic Mac dialogs which has many disadvantages. No more than one window of any type (invoice, bank register, etc.) can be open at any one time. There is a maximum of around a dozen windows of all types that can be open at one time. Worse, many things that you think are menus (e.g., selecting a vendor) are really dialogs so you may be several levels deep in dialogs and have to back out and close something because you can't select from something you think of as a menu. Some of the dialogs (like transaction recap) are even modal dialogs and lock up the whole application. The file handling APIs that it uses are also ancient history. One side effect of this is that it doesn't support long file names. You're still stuck with the old Classic Mac limit that went away for most apps a decade ago (was it 31 characters? I forget). Even new features suffer from this. If you try to attach a file to an entry (a new feature in the current version) it fails if the file's name is longer than the MacOS 9 limit. If you try to open an accounts file with a long name you get nothing but a beep, not even an error message. It's too bad that an otherwise reasonable program is so crippled by a bad user interface."