Looking Forward to MacOS 12 (Monterey)

Last week, during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, we were all introduced to the next major update coming to the Mac operating system: MacOS 12 (Monterey). Like you, we’re always excited to learn about Apple’s plans for the Mac each year. Although no new Mac hardware was announced, the improved technologies coming to Monterey should provide great opportunities for future development.

We’re particularly interested in the renewed attention being brought to automation, most notable in the announcement of Shortcuts for Mac. In the last few years, Apple had seemed disinterested in enhancing scripting support in MacOS, which made it difficult for us to consider investing in these capabilities. Nevertheless, we’re well aware of the desire for automated control of our apps, and we’re now hopeful that devoting resources to this area will be worthwhile. We’ll be exploring these new possibilities to determine where automation can come to our apps in the future.

Current Status

We’re already running the developer beta of Monterey on multiple Macs internally, and we’ve also updated our Status page to make mention of the new operating system. That page is always the best place to find up-to-date information related to our support for Apple’s latest operating systems.

As that page notes, our products do not yet support Monterey. We also do not expect to post Monterey-compatible updates in the near future. If you’re an end user, you’d do well to steer clear of developer previews: they’re intended specifically for developers, providing a testing environment to ensure compatibility between app updates and the new OS. We work with these betas to create future updates that everyone can enjoy, but the OS is often quite buggy and not yet ready for widespread use.

An Additional Note About Public Betas

Apple also announced that a public beta of Monterey will be available some time in July. In our experience, these pre-release betas are a poor bet for most users, particularly those using their Macs as production machines. We always recommend sticking with Apple’s publicly released OSes.

That said, we certainly understand the interest folks have in trying out the new features coming to Monterey! Rather than running any risks in updating your Mac’s main environment, you should consider installing to a second volume or an external drive. Apple’s APFS file system makes it very easy to create a separate volume to install another copy of MacOS, but if you’re concerned about disk space then installing Monterey to an external SSD drive is also very straightforward. With either of these options, you can test new features without negatively impacting your carefully configured day-to-day setup.

Our Plan: Be Ready for The Public Release

We always aim to support each new version of MacOS as soon as Apple officially releases it. We’re proud that we’ve been able to hit this goal for several years in a row, and we’re hard at work so we can keep that streak going in 2021. Expect more news from us later this year on that front.

In the months ahead, our Status page will be updated with Monterey-specific details for each of our apps. We’ll also be adding other tidbits to our social media accounts as we discover them.

For now, if you want to use our apps you’ll need to be sure to stick with a compatible version of MacOS. We continue to fully support MacOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and later, including the current MacOS 11 (Big Sur), on both Intel and Apple’s M1 Macs.