I've been passing the time today cursing myself for not listening to
Turkish Pickle regarding my new WFH computer purchase.
My new 8-core i9 WFH goodness is now at the local UPS terminal, and will be delivered on Monday. Planning ahead, I started reading Apple's Mac-to-Mac migration instructions. Requirement #1 was that both systems needed to be on the same exact version of MacOS or bad things will happen. So, I had to kiss those few 32-bit apps that I can't find 64-bit updates to goodbye, and do the dreaded MacOS Catalina upgrade that I've been dreading for months.
Long story short, nobody mentioned that Apple finally killed off Steve Jobs' beloved Dashboard screen and all of its widgets in Catalina! I use those widgets almost every hour at work, as my stock market viewer, calculator, calendar overview, units converter, and even my quick weather app. Apple has been forcing everyone to their less-useful Notification bar (cloned from iPhone), and of course most of the useful Dashboard widgets do not have native Notification bar equivalents. I spent most of the day scrounging the App Store and web for suitable replacements, and think that I can get by now. Did you know that 1.000 feet/second acceleration is equal to 30.48 Galileos? I can sleep again.
My next discovery was that Catalina has a few undocumented changes in the Automator app syntax. Many moons ago, I wrote an Automator app that runs as a MacOS service. It takes highlighted info from text-based network security logs, and looks up the source network and other useful stuff. Guess what didn't work on Catalina? Four more hours to figure out that they changed the syntax without telling anyone or even throwing a warning error. I'm making notes and collecting up all of these changes to back-port to my office iMac locked down at work, since I'll have to do it all over whenever we are allowed back to the salt mines.
On the bright side, I discovered that Airplay can use my wall-mounted TV as a second monitor through the Apple TV. Never realized how much I used two monitors at work until one of them is gone.
I feel like a drug addict with withdrawal pains right now, pointlessly triple-swiping to the right on my trackpad and not finding my Dashboard fix there any more.....
