Compatibility on MacOS

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Hi,
Is there any announcements from Wavemetrics (especially regarding Igor Pro 8 and 9) with respect to the compatibility with Mac OS Big Sur (MacOS 11).

Will the users need to install the Rosetta software? Would Igor Pro work natively on this new OS? There is a beta version of the OS, and the first official version will be issued on November 12th, so I am hoping we will have good news from Wavemetrics :)

Last, is there any influence of CPU architecture on the compatibility of Igor? Will Igor be compatible with the new CPU ARM architecture ("Silicon" chips by Apple)?

Thank you for your insights and support.

As has been said by Howard Rodstein (one of the owners of the company) in the Igor Pro mailing list when asked this question previously (about the ARM port, that is):

We have no plans to port to ARM. Perhaps in a year or two we will revisit the issue.

We have no experience with Rosetta and I don't expect that we will have any for some time.

In case that is not clear, this means that Igor will not run natively on non-Intel machines (maybe ever, at least for quite some time).

Sometime after macOS BS is released we will update https://www.wavemetrics.com/news/igor-pro-macos-1015-catalina if there is any new information that applies to BS.

If Igor Pro compatibility is important to you, I suggest you be very cautions changing operating systems on Macintosh, and particularly about changing hardware architecture.

Since we are currently beta testing Igor Pro 9, any major changes that would be required to get Igor to run properly on BS will likely only be made to IP9 beta. We can no longer create an official release of Igor Pro 8 on macOS due to Apple's notarization requirements so if such changes are made for Igor Pro 8 they would only be for the nightly build.

November 11, 2020 at 06:59 am - Permalink

Thank you both for your answers and these pieces of information. I would gladly switch to Igor on Linux but this seems to remain on our Wish List :)

Stay well.

PS: if you need beta-testers for IP9, I would be happy to help. I recently purchase IP8 but I cannot afford a new version any time soon :_(

November 13, 2020 at 02:17 pm - Permalink

Thank you for sharing this link.

Actually, I purchase my license for IP8 in November 2019, so I won't be allowed to have a license for IP9. I cannot purchase it (I am a postdoc, so poverty and precarity is my perpetual burden), so I guess I will have to make up without it, unfortunately. So I guess there is no need either for me to register for IP9 beta :_(

November 15, 2020 at 03:43 pm - Permalink