Mac OSX Lion coming this Summer

[Greg Kmethy]

As many of you probably know, OSX Lion is coming out this summer. It's very likely that there will be no Rosetta in Lion, which means that old PowerPC applications won't run on Lion. As a consequence, ArchiCAD 10 will be the oldest version running on OSX 10.7 Lion and files created with ArchiCAD 6.0 or older will not open on OS 10.7. It's time to update those ArchiCAD 6.0 projects before moving to OSX Lion. The ArchiCAD File Converters are a great help for this:
http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/downloads/Fileconverter.html

Another Mac-related news that GRAPHISOFT has announced earlier (here on AC-Talk as well) is that ArchiCAD 14 is the last 32-bit version on Mac. The next version of ArchiCAD will be 64-bit only. This might affect users who use older Macs. Early 2006 machines fitted with "Core Solo" or "Core Duo" processors don't support 64-bit.
Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Quad-Core Xeons, Dual-Core Intel Xeons, and i3/i5/i7's are OK.

Related ArchicadWiki articles with more details on the subject:
http://archicadwiki.com/MacOSXLion
http://archicadwiki.com/64-bit
http://archicadwiki.com/Rosetta

[Karl Ottenstein]

I've been wondering when the Lion and 64 bit issues would appear here. 😉

Of course it is also worth inventorying your Mac to see what other software (besides pre-10 versions of AC) you have that are non-Intel programs (PPC).

For some, this might be a stumbling block for upgrading to Lion (at least right away).

You can see which running processes are Power PC (PPC) by launching Activity Monitor and sorting the column called "Kind" - which will then group your Intel, Intel 64 bit and Power PC apps.

This will only list running apps, though. You might want to go through everything in your Applications and Utilities folder to inspect their type. For example, Microsoft Office 2004 apps are all PPC. File Info will show these as simply "Application" - as opposed to "Universal" or "Intel" which is what you want to see for migrating to Lion.

Caution: you may have services on your Mac that are located elsewhere and will be hard to track down to determine if they are PPC code. For example, preference panel items or drivers for (older) printers and other hardware or services. At some point before Lion arrives - maybe even now? - I would expect a 3rd party to have some kind of scanning software that would list all of these things for you to make it easier to decide if you can safely switch to Lion without losing some current functionality.

An option that OS X makes easy is to retain your Snow Leopard (or earlier) OS as a boot volume on a separate drive (even an external drive) or a partition of an existing drive. Then, you can at least restart your Mac with the older OS if you need to run an older PPC program. This cloning is done in Disk Manager (and/or with 3rd party programs like Carbon Copy Cloner, Chronosync, etc).

I would always recommend creating a clone of your boot disk before upgrading to a new version of OS X, "just in case".

Even with such an alternative boot volume which could still let you run old versions, it is worth following Greg's advice and converting all files that are in version 6 or earlier format. 🙂

Cheers,
Karl

[Erich]

To easily check all your programs, running or not:

Under the apple menu select "About this Mac"
Click the "More Info..." button
In the software section select "Applications"
Select "Kind" to sort the subsequent list

You will see four possible options: Universal, Intel, PowerPC and Blank. You will need to worry about anything that is PowerPC or possibly Blank.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Thanks, Erich! I never noticed that column - my other columns were too wide for it to show and I hadn't noticed the scrollbar. Perfect! 🙂 I see we can do the same thing there with Extensions and Frameworks, although Preference Panes do not display their info.

A shame to see that various scripts in Adobe CS5 are PowerPC. Presumably just-announced CS5.5 will be all-Intel, but don't know..

Anyone still using MaxonForm - it is PPC.

Could be an "interesting" transition to Lion!

Cheers,
Karl

[Stephen Dolbee]

Any word on AC15 compatibility with Lion?
Increased use of gestures?

[Rick Thompson]

Well, I don't like this. Plotflow is PowerPC, and removed from AC15. I love Plotflow. Come on GS??? Am I the only person left using PLotflow???

[David Maudlin]

Rick:

I have not tried, but I think PlotFlow should work regardless of ArchiCAD version, since it is just taking .plt files and passing them to the plotter.

Yes, there needs to be an Intel version of PlotFlow for those changing to Lion.

David

[Rick Thompson]

David wrote:
Rick:

I have not tried, but I think PlotFlow should work regardless of ArchiCAD version, since it is just taking .plt files and passing them to the plotter.

Yes, there needs to be an Intel version of PlotFlow for those changing to Lion.

David

It does. The app has not changed in years, but I would like to use Lion.

[Anonymous]

"watching/listening" the wwdc right now, and was wondering if 14 will work with lion?

[Ralph Wessel]

Shae wrote:
"watching/listening" the wwdc right now, and was wondering if 14 will work with lion?

I think you should expect all Intel-based applications to continue working with Lion. But don't expect them to leverage all the advantages of Lion, e.g. versioning and cloud-interaction. Invariably a major OS update will expose bugs in a few existing applications, so some patching/updating would not be a big surprise. I think the only significant casualty will be old PPC-based applications.