Automatic Download of macOS Sierra
Apple told me on Monday that it is making its new macOS Sierra available to customers as an automatic download beginning today. What this means for users is that if you have auto update downloads enabled, macOS Sierra will download in the background for you.
It’s important to note that this is not an automatic installer—this process will only download the update in the background, and then alert you that it is available to install. You can choose to install it when its convenient. You can also choose to ignore the update.
More importantly, this move may lessen the perceived significance of installing a major update to macOS. While Sierra doesn’t bring sweeping changes, putting it on the same level of updating Tweetbot feels a little problematic.
Unless you’re a developer, I do not recommend updating to macOS 10.12 yet, principally because of the many PDF bugs, which go way beyond what I’ve documented. It looks to me like a discoveryd-type situation. One developer e-mailed me to say:
Whoever rewrote PDFKit should be strung up. They should totally rip it out and replace it with the one from 10.11.
See also: Lloyd Chambers:
When I see a folder with zero (0) bytes, I have a tendency to hit cmd-delete to put it into the trash, and then cmd-shift-delete to empty the trash. A habit I must now unlearn, or possibly suffer data loss.
Following the release of macOS Sierra last month, the latest operating system has caused some compatibility and stability issues with Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac that both companies are working to resolve.
A growing number of users on Adobe's support community claim that Photoshop CC crashes when attempting to print projects after updating to macOS Sierra. Doug Thomson, for example, is unable to print to his Epson 7890, while some other Epson and Canon printer models appear to be affected.
I’ve seen printing problems in a variety of apps.
Update (2016-10-04): Adam Engst has an update on ScanSnap compatibility. It sounds like the issues may not affect me, after all, but I’m going to keep running it in a 10.11 VMware just in case.
See also: Cocoa-Dev.
Update (2016-10-05): Antonio Nunes:
Whatever is going on with PDFKit, it’s not good. At least, it wasn’t for 10.11 and 10.12. PDFKit developed some serious flaws in 10.11, and despite my bug reporting these issues did not get fixed. It’s even so bad that in a 10.12 beta I reported how one of those bugs was affecting the Preview app, and in the next beta issue was fixed in Preview, but not in PDFKit. Which leads me to believe that Preview may no longer be using PDFKit, or at least not its public API in places. And no acknowledgement from Apple whatsoever about any of the PDFKit related bug reports. The issues concerning rendering in PDFKit since 10.11 cripple such a significant part of my software’s functionality, without the possibility of a workaround, that I had to decide to EOL my software, now that it is clear that they won’t be fixed in 10.12.
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I certainly hope they’ll do a better job a version checking than now… I have two obsolete Macs that run 10.11 very well (OK - for what I ask them to do anyway…). On both of them the update panel of the App Store offer me 10.12 (Free upgrade - in all caps).
I won’t (can’t) comment on the 10.12 PDF issues you flag as I have yet to upgrade the other Mac. There is nothing really attractive in 10.12.
It's the PDF issues that are stopping me from updating; luckily Fujitsu pushed a warning with their ScanSnap update process. Reading between the lines, it feels possible that Fujitsu had tested their ScanSnap software and were taken aback by the final release of Sierra breaking so many PDF things. I wonder if this was some last-minute thing that got rolled in?
Seems a terrible shame for Apple, who had such an excellent reputation for handling PDF stuff. I remember being delighted when I got my first Mac that I could just use Preview and didn't have to install Acrobat Anything.
