MacOS Sonoma 14.3 breaks critical functionality in Photo Mechanic Plus

[ahoward]

MacOS 14.3 Sonoma causes the Organizer and content in the windows opened from the Catalog menu to not display. We reported this issue to Apple during the beta period and while they have let us know that they are "actively investigating" the issue, they have not provided any further updates since then. We advise all users of Photo Mechanic Plus to hold off on updating their systems to 14.3 while we wait to hear back from Apple about this issue.

As far as we know, this MacOS update does not impact Photo Mechanic 6 users.


UPDATE, Jan 22: Apple has let us know that they believe they have identified the root cause of the issue and a fix is in test as of this morning.

[Kirk Baker]

Hello macOS Sonoma users,

We've made a new build of Photo Mechanic Plus that has fixed the blank Catalog windows issue.  We've tried several systems (Apple Silicon and Intel-based Macs) and they're working fine now.  We've even tried it on the macOS Sonoma 14.4 beta (23E5180j) and it works fine there too.

We would like to offer this build for your use as well, but there are some caveats:

This build has not undergone our usual test procedures.
It has a number of changes due to our migration from macOS Mojave to macOS Monterrey for development.  These are:

1) A newer development environment. (Xcode 10.x -> Xcode 14.)
2) A newer software development kit. (MacOSX 10.10 -> 10.15 [macOS 11])
3) A newer macOS being used for building the application. (Mojave -> Monterrey)
4) A newer notarization system for digitally signing the application.  (The old system Apple provided was phased out in November 2023.)

We expect no major issues because of the above changes.  But like I said, this build has not undergone any of our usual test procedures.  We're trying to get you a build that functions again as quickly as we are able.  Generally, with an untested build we would make it a beta, which would have an end date and a warning dialog on each launch.  This build is not a beta because you've already been inconvenienced enough and we don't want you to have the beta experience.

Please give it a try and let us know if you have any issues with the new build:

https://www.camerabits.com/download/PhotoMechanicPlusR7051_6c141843.dmg

Non-macOS-Sonoma-users are welcome to use the new Photo Mechanic Plus build, but it will not run on macOS systems older than Big Sur (macOS 11).

[ahoward]

Today Apple released MacOS 14.4 beta 2. They let us know that this new beta introduces Apple's changes that they had mentioned were in testing a few weeks ago. After testing, we can confirm that beta 2 does correct the issue in Photo Mechanic Plus build 6890 (our current public build). There also seem to be no negative effects in this beta update to the fixes we made to correct the issue for users on 14.3.

So to summarize, if you are on:
14.3: continue to use build 7051
14.4: update the OS to beta 2, and then either build 6890 or 7051 will work for you

As always, if you encounter any issues with Photo Mechanic, definitely let us know!