Musings on color management, CHROMiX products and services and other relevant topics.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

ColorThink Pro and 64bits (Catalina)


ColorThink, our venerable color graphing and diagnosing tool, has been available in one form or another since August 2000 and has users in over 90 countries. We continue to develop updates for the current releases and have also been working on a significant upgrade for some time.

Our plan has been to have a 4.x upgrade before macOS Catalina (10.15) was released. Apple's new macOS has removed the ability to run 32-bit applications entirely; while you can run them in VM environments like Parallels or VMware, it's a pain, and something we like to avoid.

Unfortunately software development is something that rarely goes to plan, and the new ColorThink hotness is not ready in time for Catalina. We're very excited about it and have been adding features and technologies developed in our other tools as well as new capabilities not seen anywhere else.

We were faced with the decision between having our great users wait until the new software is ready (see above re: software development delays) or do some retrospective development by rolling up our sleeves and pushing to get the current version (or a feature-equivalent version) running happily in 64 bits and on Catalina. The number of people who have leapt onto Catalina immediately after it shipped has been surprising (and a little alarming to cautious-upgrade me), and we've been receiving emails and calls about a Catalina-compatible version.

We decided it was important to support our faithful users and industry friends, so we've chosen to release ColorThink Pro 3.0.8 for 64-bit. This has feature parity with the 32-bit version you currently use and should behave the same way as much as possible. Windows users will still run the 32-bit version and we expect to release a 64-bit version for Windows in the 4.x release cycle. ColorThink 2 users (non Pro) will have to wait a bit longer as we're still determining how best to bring them into the 64-bit world.

We're creating and testing builds regularly and have now made ColorThink Pro 3.0.8 64-bit available for beta testing. You can download it from the ColorThink download page. PLEASE check out the ReadMe notes with each new beta version to see the known issues (things you may notice that don't need reporting) and also please let us know about the things that need fixing. We understand there may be some outstanding issues from 3.0.7 that have not been addressed in 3.0.8 64-bit but our plan and priority is to create feature parity as much as possible.

Thanks everyone for your patience and for using ColorThink for almost 20 years!

Steve



2 comments:

  1. The "subscribe to content" link at the top of the site just loads XML. Is there another way to subscribe to updates, or at least be notified of when ColorThink Pro 4 is released? Thank you.

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    1. The best way to get notified about our new releases is to sign up for our newsletter. We'll make sure the word gets out there!

      https://www.chromix.com/colornews/

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