MacOS Sonoma (public beta)

MacRumors is suggesting that Apple’s public betas are pretty well-behaved these days, providing your applications are ready for them. Personally, I still wouldn’t risk it while working on anything I wouldn’t want to lose. So, where is Dorico in all this, and will anyone be trying it in beta?

“Welcome to the world of beta-testing, where you can have tomorrow’s problems, today!”

You’ll find each year is pretty consistent:
Someone will try it out, and either find problems, or not (and their experience may not be universal).
The Dorico team will, at some point, make an announcement about compatibility when enough data has come in. Beta-testers will be advised that they do so at their own risk.
A future point update will address any issues and a new statement issued.

At this stage, it’s debatable whether a problem is something that Apple needs to/will fix, or if the developer does.

I’ve been beta-testing since 2009, and this is the first year I’ve not bothered. It took six years for the very first bug I filed to get fixed; and now most of things I file about are things that Apple wants to do anyway. (E.g. Stopping the user from doing things; or breaches of their own Human Interface Guidelines.)

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Despite my earlier ennui, I have been trying the Release Candidate of Sonoma, and FWIW, Dorico seems to run perfectly well on it, in my usage.

Furthermore, all accounts suggest that Sonoma is a pretty solid release, with lots of bug fixes.

It’ll be released on 26 September.

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Although you shouldn’t take this as being any sort of official Steinberg statement about the eventual Sonoma release, we are aware of some issues in the current beta with the way that it renders the UI of some Steinberg products. In the context of Dorico this doesn’t seem to affect Dorico itself but it does affect some Steinberg VSTs that might be hosted within Dorico, including things like HALion, REVerence etc. The VSTs will work fine but the UI may not display correctly, depending on exactly how it is shown.

Just to reiterate, this is not an official statement about Sonoma compatibility - we won’t be able to issue that until Sonoma is finalised - but it is a warning to anyone wanting to do business-critical work using the current macOS public beta with Dorico.

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Oh, yes. I see what you mean. Sorry, I hadn’t looked at those.

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I liked your quote on betas. Made me laugh.

Ooh. Just discovered that Sonoma has removed native support for PostScript interpreting.

pstopdf (the Terminal command for converting PostScript to PDF) has gone; as has the whole PS interpreter framework.

You can still output PostScript from apps for printing.

But I hope Preview will still open and convert PS files … ?

Didn’t it stop doing that in Ventura?

No. As Richard says, that was removed in Ventura. The “Save As PostScript” command is still in the Print dialog’s PDF button; and the OS will still create PS to send to a printer: but there’s no native interpreting of PS anymore.

You’ll need GhostScript or other third-party apps to process PS now.

Thanks, guys. I guess I can’t complain, as this means more control over the process.