Apple chose today to release macOS 10.15 Catalina. The latest major update to the Mac operating system. 🥳

I’ve been testing Denied, Carbonize, Relax, Pipvid and Timeless with every new beta since they came available and I’m happy to report they all work fine.

Upgrading

You’ll get a notification about the update at some point. If you want to upgrade early, open System Preferences and select System Update.

After a moment or two you’ll get the option to Upgrade Now.

Denied

iTunes has been replaced by separate apps for music, podcasts, TV and books. All very appropriately named after the media they expose. I’ve added support for Music.app in Denied v1.7.

Song skipping through all filters works perfectly. There’s an unfixed bug in Music that prevents Denied from grabbing the track information when the app first launches and before Music was set to play, pause, skip to the next or previous track. This is mainly cosmetic. I’m confident Apple will address the issue in a future update to Catalina.

Pipvid

QuickTime gained a built-in picture-in-picture mode in macOS 10.15. I’ve been on the fence about removing my custom solution, now there’s a native implementation.

For the moment I’ve decided to stay with the custom feature I built specifically for Pipvid. The main reason being that my solution allows me to enable and disable picture-in-picture by simply resizing the player window. I love that feature myself.

The new pip-button in QuickTime is easily accessible to those who prefer the native variant.

I’m working on a hybrid solution that could make the best of both options. That’s not quite ready yet.

Others

Carbonize, Relax and Timeless work exactly like they did on macOS Mojave. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much on Catalina as you did on Mojave. 😄

Have fun exploring the new features!

The team behind Carbon has been acquired by FOSSA a few days ago. That’s great news for them and for Carbon!

It also means that updates to the web based tool are coming out even fast than before. Most just add features to Carbonize, some alter the UI and require an update from my end.

I’ve released version 1.2.8 a few days ago to accommodate the changes Carbon made in version 4.3.0. It’s now available for download from the Mac App Store. Enjoy!

Since the first Beta of macOS 10.15 Catalina became available on June 6th, I’ve been working on adding support for the new Music app that will replace iTunes to Denied.

A bug in the new operating system made this less than trivial unfortunately. Every time Denied tries to retrieve the title of the current track, it gets an error. After waiting nine beta releases for Apple to address the issue, I decided to ship an update that works around the issue.

This means that Denied version 1.7 with preliminary support for Catalina’s Music app is now available for download. 🚀

I say preliminary because it focusses on skipping tracks through one of the familiar filters. There is a known issue that prevents Denied from grabbing the track information when the app first launches and before Music.app was set to play, pause, skip to the next or previous track. As soon as Apple resolves the issue it should work exactly like it did on previous versions of macOS.

Here’s a complete list of changes I made. It’s a pretty huge update!

Added

• This update adds preliminary support for future versions of macOS and their music app.

👆 Apple rejects apps that mention the name of apps and macOS versions that haven’t been released yet, hence the vague mention of what this update actually introduces.

Changed

• I’ve updated the project and its dependencies.
• The animations have been redone.
• The minimum supported version of macOS is now 10.14 Mojave.
• Lots of under the hood improvements have been made.

Removed

• The crash reporter has been removed, as the service I was using is being retired. I’m keeping an eye out for an alternative. You can always get help through support.dangercove.com

Carbonize version 1.2.7 is now available for download.

The update contains a fix for the update carbon.now.sh shipped earlier this week. In the update they moved a button, which in turn made Carbonize hide the wrong interface element. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this caused.

To prevent this issue in the future, I’d like to ship an offline version of the underlying Carbon editor with Carbonize. This would allow you to use Carbonize fully offline and make sure an update to the Carbon website won’t break Carbonize.

I’m close to getting this to work, but it’s not quite ready yet. 🤞

Pipvid version 1.2 is now available for download. You can also get it by checking for updates in the app.

The update contains some bug fixes and a rewritten license window. I’ve actually ported over the new license window from Timeless to Pipvid, making it easier to share updates across all my apps.

Want to try the new license window? Buy Pipvid today. 😉