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Welcome to Big Sur

November 12, 2020

Today Apple has released macOS 11 Big Sur. A lot has changed with this year's update of the Mac operating system. So much that after two decades, Apple decided to name it macOS 11 Big Sur. Mac OS X (Mac OS 10.x) is now a thing of the past.

Everything ready

• All my Mac apps have been updated to run well with macOS 11 and use new features where it makes sense. The most visible change is the updated design of the user interface. It looks much more like iPadOS and iOS now while not giving up on features we know and love from previous versions of macOS. I think this consistency is good and will make it easier for users to navigate between different devices, which is why it was important for me to make sure all apps are build with Big Sur in mind from day one. That wasn't as easy as one might think, especially if you still want your apps to look great on older versions of macOS as well. It took some time and other projects like Rocket Typist 3 had to to be postponed. But now I'm fully back on that again and beta tests will start soon. It will also get an updated user interface which is why only minor updates have been made for Rocket Typist 2 on Big Sur.

• Apple Silicon

  Another big change of macOS 11 is the support for Apple Silicon. With the exception of Screenshot Path I wasn’t able to build any of my apps to run natively on Apple Silicon just yet. However, all of my apps should still perform great on Macs with Apple Silicon thanks to Apple’s Rosetta 2 engine which is very quick in translating Intel CPU instructions to ARM instructions. At the moment many third party frameworks that my apps use haven’t been optimised for Apple Silicon yet. It’ll need some time, but I am confident that most if not all my apps will support Apple Silicon before Apple has even finished transitioning the complete Mac lineup.