Be Wary About Upgrading To Mac OS Catalina

I upgraded to Catalina this afternoon and it has some major problems associated with the Magic Mouse. In Safari there is no smooth scrolling - it is all jerky, however in Mail it scrolls smoothly. Secondly when you click on a button it seems to bring up an options menu that I can’t see how to get rid of, instead of closing a tab it comes up with an option to pin the tab, or close the tab etc. You have to click up to three times on the button before it closes etc. It seems everything you click on comes with an options menu. It is exceedingly annoying. If I can’t fix it I am going to use Time Machine tomorrow to revert back to the previous version of Mac OS.

21" iMac 2017

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I echo this warning - I tested the public beta on a seperate partition and it isn’t great stability wise - wait for 10.15.1 or 10.15.2.

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Been perfectly fine on my system

24 hours on things have settled down. My Mac automatically restarted twice last night so it may have been upgrading. The Magic Mouse pointer clicking is now okay, but the scrolling in Safari is still jerky. The scrolling in Mail & Music is normal.

The really annoying thing has been upgrading to the Music App. More than half my artwork was missing after the upgrade. Even some artwork from albums I purchased off the old iTunes was missing and wouldn’t restore even after using the “Get Album Artwork” tab. Most of the missing artwork was from CD’s which I had added manually into iTunes. Luckily I still had most of the scans of the CD covers.

I will see how it goes from now.

I have just found out that the scrolling problem was because I have been using Magic Prefs and it is now not supported on Catalina.

I looked at the title of this thread and took it more generally. From what I have read, we need to be wary about updating without some preparation and research.

See Jason Snell’s review:

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I updated 3 Macs here, and they all went reasonably smoothly.

If there are initial issues (I had a stuck setting up screen, and on another machine, I couldn’t see an external drive), a hard reboot fixed it.

A couple of apps no longer work, but that was not unanticipated.

I’ve found another problem, as you are probably aware, you now have to sync your iPhone using finder - not the music app.

If you want to add music to your iPhone you have also to use Finder. Under the music tab you have the option of Artist, Album, Genres and Playlist. If you use the Artist tab you can only click on the listed artists - you can’t choose which albums of your chosen artist to add to your iPhone it will automatically add all albums of that artist. If you choose the Album tab the listing is very simplified, you only see the name of the album. This is okay until you get names like “Greatest Hits”, in my case there are 10 Greatest Hits albums listed but there is no artist names on the listing so you don’t actually know which album you are transferring to your iPhone. I think some renaming of Greatest Hits albums might be necessary to see what the titles are.

I assume the same thing happens with Genres - if you by Genre it will add all albums in that genre, you can’t choose which ones. Playlists which I use in the car with CarPlay are less of a problem as I always add all playlists.

There are new updates rolling out with FCP X being one:
Final Cut Pro release notes – Apple Support.

There are already issues reported so if you make the leap, BACKUP, your existing system as a fallback.
Catalina is on the way as well, old 32 bit files will no longer function in that version of OS.
Another good reason to BACKUP.

Al

The only doubtful application I have is Google Earth Pro. It is supposed to be 64 bit but is flagged often by Mojave as a 32 bit app that needs to be updated. Can someone verify that it works under Mojave for me please?

Cheers
Steve

I can’t give you a confirmation till I get home tonight but from my own checking, Google Earth is in 64 bit but it has a plugin that is 32 bit. I have an application that identifies 32/64 bit applications and to distinguishes between plugins being 32 bit and whole applications being compiled in 32 bit. Can’t remember the name of said application though!

This info is available through System Information:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.com/article/3393161/how-to-find-out-if-your-mac-software-is-32-or-64-bit.amp.html

Al

System information gives you basic info but Go64 gives far better information - it can tell you exactly which part of an application is 64 bit Go64

This is is what it says about Google Earth

08%20pm

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Yes I’ve seen similar reports but so far I’ve not seen anyone saying that GEPro either works or doesn’t work with Catalina. So if anyone has it please fire it up and let me know.

Cheers
Steve

@SteveClark I’m just updating to the final release of Catalina now, my spare partition was still on public beta 8. Will let you know once its updated and I download google earth :slight_smile:

Much obliged. Living in Tanzania at the moment so updating my computer to Catalina and having everything working is important as internet access here is limited if things go wrong. I rely on Google Earth for my job here. Looking forward to good news from you.

I’ve downloaded and installed Google Earth Pro (latest version) and it opens and seems to run fine… If your machine is work essential I would recommend waiting for Mac OS 10.15.1 or even 10.15.2.

Great news. Thanks. I’ll probably pull the trigger on the weekend.

I only gave it a very basic spin - are there any specific functions you want me to check

All good thanks. Catalina running and GEPro seems fine. Office 2011 on the other hand! Dead and gone.