Last week in my contribution to the Low End Mac Round
Table on the 20th anniversary of Linux, I mentioned that at least
four of my core production applications - Tex-Edit Plus, Color It! 4.5, Mail Beacon, and Eudora 6 won't run in
OS X 10.7 Lion.
That observation needs updating.
Tex-Edit Plus and Lion
Coincidentally, just about the time I composed that commentary,
Tex-Edit Plus (TE+) developer Tom Bender was posting a new "universal"
build of the application, Version 4.9.9 beta 3,
that does support Lion. Tom emailed me on the weekend to say that he's
sorry about the slow pace of getting a Lion-compatible TE+ upgrade out,
but that the new beta seems to run fine so far on 10.7. He's running
Lion on a pre-unibody MacBook to test TE+ Lion compatibility,
Tom says he was always satisfied with performance using Rosetta -
until he finally got an Intel version running, with which he's noted a
"fairly impressive speed jump" on his iMac (still running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard). I'm
composing this article in it right now, and he's right. Tex-Edit Plus
has always been lively and nimble, but this Intel native beta is the
quickest yet. The universal beta uses its own preferences file, so you
can run the PPC and Intel versions on the same system and not commit to
the upgrade until you're sure you like it.
Tom says the main caveat is lack of full compatibility between the
old and new document formats, and that RTF works best for transferring
docs back and forth between multiple Mac systems, versions, and so
forth. Too true. Documents saved by the Universal beta in TE+ format
won't open with the classic PPC application. Tom also notes that Lion
apparently tags TE+ read-only docs as containing executable code (news
to him as the program's author), and each one throws an
"are-you-sure-you-want-to-launch-this-new-app" warning the first time
it's opened.
Those glitches notwithstanding, an OS X 10.7 compatible build of
Tex-Edit Plus is super good news for me, because the prospect of losing
TE+ was probably the single biggest obstacle to my upgrading to Lion
(although there are still plenty of other Lion issues I'm not at all
happy about).
I depend heavily on in TE+, thanks especially to its implementation
of AppleScript. Lots of applications support AppleScript, but none
comes even remotely close to doing it as elegantly and slickly as TE+.
Thanks to that feature, I've customized TE+ over the years to perform
beautifully and efficiently as my main HTML markup and text cleaning
tool. It's not 100%, and I still need the "Zap Gremlins" feature in
TextWrangler too,
but it's close, and another big TE+ advantage is that it also supports
enough text styling and formatting that I can use it for most
everything I would ever use a word processor for. I've been working
mostly in plain text or HTML for more than a decade now.
There's also an official AppleScripts for Tex-Edit
Archives site maintained by Doug Adams, chockablock with hints,
tips, examples, and step-by-step instructions as well as dozens of
downloadable AppleScripts that can be used to tailor TE+ to a user's
particular needs and tastes.
Add to that a 15 year accretion of archived files in TE+ format
numbering in the thousands, and I have some pretty compelling reasons
for not wanting to say good-bye to this wonderful tool. Now I won't
have to at whatever point I transition to Lion.
New in Tex-Edit Plus 4.9.9 beta 3 for OS X:
- Small changes to interface cosmetics for Lion compatibility.
- New Intel preferences file allows both TEP versions (PPC/Rosetta
and Intel/Universal) to coexist on same volume. This also causes fewer
problems when replacing old versions of TEP.
- Fixed "Show Fonts" bug.
- Improved memory handling when saving files that contain big
resources (e.g. TIFFs).
- Universal build.
- Requires 10.5 or newer.
- Lion compatible.
- Document format is not fully cross compatible with old
Tex-Edit documents. Read the warnings.
- Check out version 4.9.8 if you need the formal PPC release
version.
Color It! and Lion
As for Color It!, the program's developer, Digimage Arts, confirms
that the current version, Color It! version 4.5, will definitely
not run under OS X 10.7 Lion - not surprising, given that Color
It! dates back to well beyond even the Mac PowerPC era, with the
earliest versions of the program being contemporary with Macs powered
by Motorola's 68020 processors, if my somewhat hazy memory serves, and
it wouldn't surprise me if there is still some old 68K code lurking in
the program. (Version 4.5 has been around since 2006, about the same
time that OS X 10.5 Leopard was
introduced.)
OS X 10.7 Lion will not run Color It! 4.5.
As with Tex-Edit Plus, Color It! remains one of my core production
tools - my workaday image editor of choice. It's not as powerful or
richly-featured as Photoshop Elements (PSE) or Pixelmator, but it sure
starts up a lot faster than Elements especially (Pixelmator is pretty
good in that department too) and has a light, quick, nimble feel to its
user interface compared to the formidable but ponderous Elements. I've
used Color It! as my workhorse graphic app since way back on my old
25 MHz 68030 LC 520 running
System 7.1, and it was even speedy on
that hardware.
Bitmap graphics or "paint" software programs are all essentially
descended from the MacPaint application that
shipped with the original Macs back in 1984.
There used to be a passel of paint programs for the Mac, including
Photoshop, Canvas,
Painter, SuperPaint,
UltraPaint,
Expert Color Paint (a licensed version of Color It! version 1.0), the
painting module in HyperCard, PixelPaint Pro, MacPaint
itself, and more.
Of all of these, Color It! came closest to being an all-round
Photoshop substitute ("Photoshop for the rest of us") at a fraction of
Photoshop's price, which is probably why it is still around while most
of the others are pushing up daisies in the software boneyard.
My first acquaintance with Color It! was Version 3.0, which came
bundled with a scanner I bought back in the mid-'90s. I was impressed
that the bundled image editing software was such a complete and
comprehensive program, and not a "crippleware" come-on to buy something
more expensive. Color It! quickly became my main image editing and
scanning program.
Color It! just flies on my 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook,
and it's much faster than any other image editor I've tried, save for
the minimalist freeware ToyViewer, which I also use
extensively, but it does require Rosetta emulation on Intel Macs, and
banefully Apple has decided to drop support Rosetta in OS X 10.7 Lion -
and consequently for all applications with PowerPC code.
Happily, Digimage Arts report that they've been working hard on a
new version of Color It! that is being built from scratch that will run
in 10.7, taking fullest advantage of things like running native on
Intel processors and accessing the full range of the system's Services.
The new version will run faster and permit working with much larger
images, and it will be able to utilize the Core Image visual effects
that are built into the operating system.
However, while this will expand the venerable old program's
capabilities and significantly update the code, it's a massive
undertaking, with much of Color It's existing underlying code being
older - which has meant it's very efficient and stable and has
weathered most updates to the operating system with virtually no
problems. Unfortunately, with Apple arbitrarily dumping Rosetta in
OS X 10.7, there's no simple way to modify the existing code to
run in Lion, so the new version will be an improved program with modern
capabilities that's also easier to update, with Digimage Arts assuring
us that it will still retain Color It's legendary ease of use.
However, until the new version is out, if you depend on Color It!,
you'll need to either postpone upgrading to OS X 10.7 Lion or set
up a dual-boot situation where you can still start up your Mac in
OS X 10.6 or earlier Mac OS builds to run Color It! version
4.5.
Personally, losing access to Color It!, while painful and unwelcome,
would not be the showstopper for me that losing access to Tex-Edit Plus
would be. I can get along using ToyViewer, Pixelmator, PSE, and by
times the quite good Open Source Seashore
image editor, which is a sort of streamlined version of the industrial
strength Open Source GIMP program. Nevertheless, that Color It! will
live on into the 64-bit Intel Mac era is wonderful news, and I eagerly
anticipate checking it out when it's ready.
Eudora and Lion
Moving along, my stated apprehensions about Eudora OSE and Lion were
evidently groundless. The roaringapps.com Lion compatibility site says
Eudora OSE "works fine" in
10.7.
The cause of my previous misapprehension was a link on the Eudora
OSE site to a page that reads:
Important Announcement about Mac Eudora and Apple OS X
10.7 "Lion"
June, 2011
In Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion", Apple has removed support for
"Rosetta". It is Rosetta that allows Mac Eudora to continue to run
under Mac OS X (up to and including OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard"). Once you
upgrade to OS X 10.7, Mac Eudora will no longer function.
Let's repeat that:
Mac Eudora WILL NOT run under Mac OS X 10.7 and
later.
Before upgrading to OS X "Lion", be sure to transfer
all of your mail to another email client as you will no longer be able
to access your mail using Mac Eudora.
Had I been more observant, I would have noticed that the message was
on former Eudora developer Qualcomm's website and refers only to the
classic Eudora email client application, not to the Mozilla
Thunderbird-based Open Source Edition. My sincere apologies for the
miscue.
Mail Beacon and Lion
Finally, I was unfortunately right about the little POP email
account-checking utility Mail Beacon, development of which was long
since discontinued by its developer even for PowerPC machines. There
are other applications that can check your messages on a POP3 server
without downloading them, but none I've found that do it as well in my
estimation. Not a dealbreaker, but I'll definitely miss it.
