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Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto and iTunes on macOS Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur
- Sporktacular 3y agoAnyone had luck getting these apps running on macOS 14/Sonoma?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- canbus 3y agohttps://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/ is a great RAW editing software which runs on macOS
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Sporktacular 3y agoCan this application be removed after say Aperture is working, or do it have to stay installed? Also, does it produce a new application package that can be installed on other computers that doesn't have Retroactive installed, or is Retroactive needed on each target machine?
- dddddaviddddd 3y agoI'm impressed by the ingenuity of people who keep old software running just a bit longer! When Catalina first came out, I used Retroactive for iTunes. This let me get one last update out for my track joiner (https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/trackconcat https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/trackconcat), targeting both the new Music app and iTunes.
- bombcar 3y agohttps://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-retroactive-work-95fe0e5ea49e https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-ret... goes into detail all the things needed to make this work
- howsitt 3y agoI've read the article but some questions still remain. Does Retroactive install the shared dylibs of previous macOS releases? Or does it use an approach similar to https://www.macports.org/ https://www.macports.org/ ?
- saagarjha 3y agoThey mention this, the frameworks that are missing are copied from earlier releases.
- davidthewatson 3y agoThere should be an ACM award for retro-computing like this. I miss Aperture so much that it's difficult to express. I dislike photo editing deeply, but for some reason, the Aperture design just made sense to me, being a person who could never grok photoshop.
- sbuk 3y agoHave a look at RAW Power from Gentleman Coders. It's the closest thing I've found to Aperture. https://www.gentlemencoders.com https://www.gentlemencoders.com
- alsetmusic 3y agoI’m curious how it performs on modern hardware. When it was new (1.0) it was dog slow on the fastest tower Apple sold. I bet it’s very usable now by comparison.
- snapetom 3y agoI used it as long as possible with Retroactive till maybe about a year ago on an iMac with an external SSD drive. I was actively trying to fight the Adobe tax. It was fine for quite a while, but in the end, it just got too buggy. Each macOS release seemed to slow it down more, and very often, thumbnails would not render. It doesn't help that Retroactive itself doesn't seem to be actively maintained.
- Xerox9213 3y agoI’m curious if you tried Lightroom.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoThe one thing that really put off of Aperture were the destructive edits, so in that regard Lightroom was a much better fit for me. Unfortunately while the app has been 64-bit for a while Adobe never sold a perpetually licensed version with a 64-bit installer, so I've stuck with macos 10.14. I'll be damned if I'm going to rent software from Adobe.
- moribvndvs 3y agoSide topic: I wish macOS would stick to just numbers in their os updates to make it drop dead easy to recall which update and how old one is. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Californian geography and even if I did, that doesn’t help me remember what Big Sur was vs. Catalina
- ClassyJacket 3y agoSame. From that headline I have no way of telling which is the oldest and which is the newest. Just put a damn number.
- alsetmusic 3y agoEven big cats I could keep track because I had a mental image of what they represented. Panther was an awesome release. And snow Leopard? Woooo!
- manxman 3y agoWhy the heck Apple kill Aperture anyway?
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoIt honestly feels like all of these problems - auto-bans by Meta and Google, enshittification of formerly-professional Apple products, nuke-your-money grabs by Ebay and Stripe - all come from a shared culture of corporate narcissism. Not only is there no genuine empathy for users, it seems important that giant corporations should have the freedom to disappoint, manipulate, and abuse everyone, should they choose to.
- ljm 3y agoShareholders and investors always want more while becoming more risk averse over time, so a company loses the ability to innovate and then switches its focus to squeezing the customer. Not to mention the cohort in product, design and engineering who want to work on the new shiny and embark on massive rewrite projects that deliver only a subset of old functionality because the ‘metrics’ support it. They’re never around to maintain it long term. Not an issue if you don’t go public or accept VC or have perverse incentives that encourage enshittification over excellence. Nobody pulling the strings for you then.
- m463 3y agoWhen it first came out, I thought it was a little porky. But then machines got faster. What I loved was that your original photos were read-only
- AnonHP 3y agoLack of interest is my guess. That plus someone in Apple imagining that it shouldn’t compete with Adobe Lightroom. Aperture, during its peak, was well liked by users. Many even liked it better than Lightroom. Even the iPhoto of that time (on iOS) had features that Photos doesn’t have till today (I recall buying iPhoto that allowed erasing things from a photo or blurring things from a photo just by using one’s finger).
- ggm 3y agospeaking of "I miss old s/w" I miss Picasa. I do like Apples photo stuff, but I loved Picasa.
- korhojoa 3y agoI miss hello. It was great, simple and fast. Then google bought picasa and it went away. :( I kept using picasa a long time after it was no longer updated, but there wasn't a good hello alternative. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/picasas-hello-discontinued.html?m=1 http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/picasas-hello-disco...
- stock_toaster 3y agoGoogle also acquired then killed Sparrow[1]. I really enjoyed that mail app. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_%28email_client%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_%28email_client%29
- TimTheTinker 3y agoFor a while in the 2000s, it seemed like Apple really had something special going. FCP, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Aperture, Shake, Logic, XSan, XServe. Even their iLife and iWork suites used to compete with mainstream productivity apps. Now they've been really dumbed down. What in the world happened? (At least we have DaVinci Resolve now... but it just doesn't have the finesse that Apple pro apps once had.)
- worthless-trash 3y agoApple moved focus to mobile. Found mad cash money there to be made and neglected their existing ecosystem.
- Foivos 3y agoIf it was neglected they would not touch it. The current versions have less functionality for no obvious reason.
- skygazer 3y agomacOS gets iPhone hand-me-downs. Apple’s cross platform endeavors start on the phone, now. Catalyst replacement apps were initially abysmal, and are glacially improving, but have not approached their former Mac greatness, and probably won’t. I’d hoped the Apple Silicon reinvigoration of the Mac would help, but it hasn’t yet. iOS reigns supreme.
- mikae1 3y agoWell, they constantly take tiny steps towards making it an iOS for the desktop. That's down to the name. Mac OS X became macOS (based on iOS). Their argument for denying users the ability to sideload software on iOS is that said software may include critical security vulnerabilities or even malware. So, why are they leaving their macOS users exposed to vulnerabilities? Why wouldn't they attempt to go in the same direction with macOS? Their absolute main reason is of course that they take a cut on all software sold via the App Store. Thankfully the EU is doing something[1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-appl...
- yborg 3y agoSo if I already converted to Apple Music and load an iTunes legacy version, will this have to duplicate the Music library?
- AnonHP 3y agoSeems like this is restricted to a few Apple applications. Is there something more generic to run older software? There was a “Swiss Army Knife” application for handling media files (mainly audio and photos? I forget) called Media Rage, by Chaotic Software. The company seems to have gone out of business (the domain is now parked with ads). Since Media Rage was 32-bit, it wouldn’t work from macOS Catalina. An old article about a Media Rage update on Mac World: https://www.macworld.com/article/175779/mediarage19.html https://www.macworld.com/article/175779/mediarage19.html
- wiredfool 3y agoI’d love to see this for Lightroom, as The last perpetually licensed version is stuck on 32 bit. I’ve got an old machine (just) for it now, but it would be nice to run it on hardware made this decade.