Q
I’ve hit problems with apps like
Blender in Mojave, which now seem
to be limited by macOS. Has Apple
removed support for OpenGL and OpenCL?
by JACK FOLEYA
Blender and other cross-platform
graphics-intensive apps usually rely
on OpenGL to render during playback,
and OpenCL during editing. Apple announced
in 2018 that both OpenGL and OpenCL are
now ‘deprecated’.
Deprecation is odd. It doesn’t mean that
Apple is about to remove support, and parts
of macOS which were deprecated years ago
are still there. It does mean they’ll be going
away at some time, and that Apple won’t fix
remaining bugs. Apple wants developers tomacOS GENIUS TIPS
move over to using Metal instead, but
unfortunately this isn’t cross-platform.
Version 2.80 of Blender should still work
well on macOS, although it’s not clear whether
that will continue to do so. If your Mac has a
supported AMD Radeon graphics card, try
AMD’s Radeon ProRender plugin for Blender
from bit.ly/mf346bldr which could improve
performance and features. AMD plugins
support other graphics-intensive apps which
may not take best advantage of Metal yet.
The free OpenGL Extensions Viewer (App
Store) provides detailed information about
the version installed.
OpenGL and OpenCL support could
change too: depending on who buys the
new Mac Pro, Apple may yet be forced
to restore their support.macOS
quick-fire
questionsHow to rename
Agenda: Widget+
app without error?
> Normally it’s easy to
change the name of the
top level folder with the
extension .app without
affecting the app, and
that in turn changes the
app’s name. Sometimes
this might cause
problems with updates,
though, and you
shouldn’t try it with
an app bundled with
macOS. There’s a catch
here in that the name
appears to contain
a colon, which isn’t
allowed in file or folder
names in the Finder,
as the colon is used
as the path delimiter.
Remove that or use a
Unicode substitute and
it should work fine.Can I clone files
between two
APFS volumes?
> Provided there’s
sufficient free drive
space, you can copy
files normally between
two APFS volumes,
but there’s no such
thing as ‘cloning’
them here. Each APFS
volume is a separate
file system, even though
they may share the
same space inside
a single Container.
When you copy a file
from one volume to
another within the
same Container, the
second file takes up
its full storage space,
and is part of that
second volume.macformat.com @macformat DECEMBER 2019 | MACFORMAT | 59OpenGL Extensions Viewer, free from the
App Store, provides detailed information
about OpenGL and other graphics support.Q
I’ve been running High Sierra
on my 10-year old unsupported
Mac, thanks to dosdude’s
patcher. Do you think it will also
upgrade to Catalina, or is it finished?
by DARREN PHILIPSA
Whether anyone patches Catalina
to allow it to run on unsupported
Mac models remains to be seen. It
may not be a wise thing even to attempt.
First consider the age of the hardware:
your Mac’s logic board and graphics card
are reaching the end of their electronic life.
Any replacement parts will be secondhand,
of similar age and vulnerable to failure. Ifyou haven’t replaced its internal storage
recently, that too is at high risk.
Unsupported versions of macOS often
have significant shortcomings too. They
may be unable to update, or obtain pushed
security updates, which puts them at risk.
The biggest problems, though, result from
the fact they run old EFI firmware, which
hasn’t been updated to support the new
version of macOS, or to fix known bugs.
As a hobby system, a Mac running an
unsupported version of macOS can be fun,
much as setting up a ‘Hackintosh’ is on
non-Apple hardware. But don’t risk it with
important documents or data, because it
would be so easy for it all to fail.Unsupported Catalina upgrades
Has macOS dropped OpenGL?