This week, Apple released 2 big efforts that have been occupying their corporate resources for quite some time: macOS 11 Big Sur, and Macs based on Apple Silicon.

Big Sur

As with most new software releases, ClueTrust has been running macOS 11 Big Sur in the lab here since long before this release, and we're happy to announce that Cartographica 1.5.2 is fully compatible with the macOS 11 Big Sur release. Big Sur contained some big changes, and as such, unfortunately, versions of Cartographica prior to 1.5.2 are not compatible. As noted in the 1.5.2 release post, due to an unexpected removal of some libraries used by Cartographica, versions prior to 1.5.2 will not run on macOS 11. However, 1.5.2 is a free update for all Cartographica users.

Apple Silicon Macs

The big announcement of this week, though, was new Macintoshes based on the Apple Silicon platform (effectively the same processor architecture used by the iPhone and iPad).

ClueTrust has been testing on Apple Silicon since June (Apple made available Apple Silicon Macs as part of an opt-in developer program) and so we have been testing and developing on Apple Silicon.

On this, we have bad news and good news. The bad news is that we're not going to be able to announce the release of a native version of Cartographica yet. The reason is that Cartographica uses a variety of third-party libraries to gain access to certain file formats (notably MrSID raster formats among others) and until those are available natively on Apple Silicon, that is going to impeded progress.

The good news is that we do have versions of Cartographica running on Apple Silicon in house and the results are impressive with Rosetta 2. We do have multiple M1 Macs for testing and will be continuing to push for support as soon as the requisite libraries are available.

Until such time as we're able to release a version of Cartographica which has native support for Apple Silicon, we are confident that the Intel version being run under Rosetta 2 will perform adequately.