Hello friends!
(Er, is anyone still here?...)
A lot of time has ambled by since the last release of Doggiebox back in August 2012. One hundred months, in fact. Yikes! And as you well know, with last year's release of MacOS 10.15 Catalina and its lack of support for 32-bit apps, Doggiebox stopped working altogether on recent Macs.
Thanks in part to the pandemic, throughout this spring and fall I've finally been able to spend enough time bringing Doggiebox back up to speed -- to make the necessary and long-overdue changes to make it 64-bit and work with the latest SDKs and current Mac developer tools. (With a legacy codebase dating back to 2002, and many MacOS updates over this span, there was a lot more to this than one might guess.)
As such, is with great pleasure that I can announce a shiny new beta! Get it here:
http://www.doggiebox.com/distribution/Doggiebox-1J01.zip
Notable changes since version 2.0.2:
- Now a 64-bit Universal build, supporting MacOS 10.15 and 11.0 on Intel and M1 Macs. (The minimum required system is now MacOS 10.9.)
- Numerous internal changes to support modern architecture and updated APIs.
- Fixed bug where trying to Revert in the drum kit editor would crash.
- Fixed bug where drum kit palette would not be shown until a song document is opened (i.e. absent for a drum kit document).
- A new preference setting “Include pre-release (development) versions” will fetch such builds when checking for updates.
Known issues in this build:
- You may be prompted to locate drum kits when opening existing songs.
- Lack of dark mode support and other minor visual anomalies.
On account of some of the plumbing changes, there might well be a number of other things that are broken. I would appreciate your feedback in identifying any problems or weirdness so that I can get it fixed. My intent is to clean up the remaining rough edges and issue an official release of Doggiebox 2.1 within the next couple of weeks.
My heartfelt thanks to all you loyal Doggiebox enthusiasts for your involvement over all these years. While the Dog may have been snoozing (!), I hope there remains a lot more life in him yet.
Arf arf!
-ben
