Hi Paul and others,
The problems with the Import dialog are depressingly familiar. Apple regularly break file dialogs for Carbon programs with every new system. They fixed these problems in a pre-release version of El Capitan, and in a post-release version of Sierra, so my hope is that they will also fix them in a future version of High Sierra. But they will only do this if enough people report problems by filing bugs in their bug reporter. The more bug reports the better, because Apple take more notice of bugs that are widely reported.
These problems won’t occur in Cocoa programs, and they won’t necessarily occur in all Carbon programs. Freeway is using (legitimate) Carbon APIs to add extra controls to the Import dialog, but Carbon programs which use vanilla dialogs probably won’t have the same problems. If you can find other Carbon programs that use extended file dialogs and have similar problems, it would be worth including information about this in bug reports.
I’m not using High Sierra, because I’m following my usual policy of giving Apple time to fix some of their bugs. If Apple don’t fix the file dialog bugs, I can think of ways to rewrite parts of Freeway that are affected. But I don’t know that I would be paid for doing this, so it’s not something that I’m planning to do in a hurry - particularly since Apple might fix the problem in a future update to High Sierra. I have a personal interest in Freeway, since I worked on it for many years, and I also have an ongoing association with Softpress, since they have published my music program (Fretspace) - but I’m no longer employed by Softpress. My plan for Fretspace is to make enough money to fund future development, including a new version of Freeway - which I have started working on, but which is a pretty major task.
As far as the current version of Freeway is concerned, there will come a time when it will no longer run on the latest (future) version of macOS. Apple have said that they will be dropping support for 32-bit applications in a future system and that High Sierra is the last system that will have “full” support for 32-bit apps. Freeway is a 32-bit app because it is a Carbon app. Apple created a 64-bit version of Carbon some years ago, but axed it because they decided - perhaps reasonably from their perspective - that they didn’t want to continue supporting two separate development frameworks (Carbon and Cocoa).
Personally, I think it’s always sensible to delay upgrading to the latest version of macOS until Apple have had time to fix bugs, but it’s not a good idea to get stuck on an old system that is no longer being supported with security updates etc. Apple normally support the current system and the previous system (and maybe the system before that) but they don’t support older systems. One way around this problem, which is popular with developers, is to use virtual systems (VMWare or Parallels) to run older systems - including systems that cannot otherwise be run on the latest hardware.
As to why Apple keep breaking Carbon file dialogs, I think that this is because they decided some years ago that they would rewrite these dialogs so that they call through to Cocoa APIs, and my suspicion is that they used private Cocoa APIs rather than public Cocoa APIs. Third-party developers are warned against using private APIs because they are not stable (in the sense that they could change in future versions of macOS), and any use of private APIs will automatically cause an application to be rejected from the App store. But Apple can use private APIs, because they wrote them and they can test their own software for problems that arise when these APIs are changed. The problem for Carbon is that it is deprecated, so Apple doesn’t devote much resource to testing it.
Jeremy
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at: