EagleFiler 1.9.22

So I was listening to ATP today, and they had a thing about the new menu inside of Settings -> General -> About which calls out remaining Intel apps.

EagleFiler was the only prominent one on the list for me. I seem to recall in the past you mentioned there are one or more parts that cannot be easily ported, but I don't recall (and probably wouldn't understand) the technical details.

I just wondered if you had any remarks on that, and the now loudly proclaimed Rosetta doom.

Not directly related but tangential, this is also going to kill a lot of CUPS drivers apparently because my printer wouldn't work until I launched EagleFiler to install Rosetta on macOS 27.

@bart Most of the app is written in Python and relies on libraries that will not be ported, so I’m rewriting it (in Swift) and taking the opportunity to also make some architectural improvements that would have been impossible with the old codebase. It’s taking a long time, but I’m really excited about where it’s going to end up.

I don’t think Apple communicated the Rosetta stuff very well. Lots of people were prematurely scared because they thought it was going away with macOS 27. It’s also annoying that the macOS 27 installer removes Rosetta and doesn’t always reinstall it automatically, leading to crashes. I remain confused about whether this is an artificial deadline, since it sounds like Apple is going to keep Rosetta around post–macOS 28, but it will only be available for games.

@Michael thanks! I figured you had a plan.

And yes I agree, this Rosetta thing is going to be...interesting. Their stated plans about this are vague and don't make a whole lot of sense at face value.

Apple's Rosetta plans are not vague. Rosetta can't run arm64 and translated x86_64 code inside the same process, so it needs a x86_64 version of all the system frameworks or libraries that a x86_64 binary will load. macOS 28 will ship a reduced number of x86_64 frameworks/libraries, just enough to run most x86_64 games.

macOS 27 beta shipped a game-test-tool cli utility to enable the slimmer x86_64 dylib cache and see what actually works, it's documented in the release notes on https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-27-release-notes .

Obviously there is a year left, so everything can change.

@galad I haven’t seen where they document which frameworks that includes. I assume that general apps won’t be allowed to run even if restricted to those frameworks (that’s what I meant by “artificial”), but I haven’t seen them say what constitutes a game.

I guess they checked most of the 64bit games around, and added only the required frameworks. I don't see a reason to document it, no one is going to release a new x86_64 game (hopefully). And if it's not a game, it's not supported, so why publish a list?

Anyway, it's possible to check what's in the dylib cache if you want a complete list. Someone did some months ago, I didn't save the url.

I have a Windows PC and Switch 2 for games. Keeping Rosetta around explicitly for games is possibly the single most absurd reason for backwards compatibility on the Mac that I could think of.

To be frank I could not care less about Intel games on my Mac.

I do, however, want my printer to work. Why don’t they care about that?

I’m sorry this should have been part of first comment but…

Seriously? Games? NOW Apple cares the slightest bit about Intel games?

After all their rivalry with Nvidia and every single video game graphics standard?

After essentially lumping discrete graphics cards in with the floppy drive as obsolete hardware?

After Apple Arcade?

After memory hole-ing Boot Camp?

After unceremoniously dropping 32 bit support categorically?

After all their years late disgraceful ports of games nobody cares about?

NOW they say Rosetta is only here for games? What?

Who is writing this absurd script?

> I also ran into (and worked around) a bug where macOS 27’s NSTextView would get into an infinite layout loop when displaying an attributed string that included images.

Can you talk more about this?