Hoarding pays off

Recently, I had a colleague tag me on Twitter looking for some units from the Ontario Curriculum Planner. A couple of university education sites had them online but he wanted more.

The people he tagged looking for assistance, including me, went to our best cloud-centric approach and suggested a number of ways to try to track these down using our best skills – and struck out.

Then, it occurred to me that I might have the solution tucked away in storage and I did. I was able to find what he was looking for. In the process, I found that I had a LOT of CDs and DVDs tucked away in storage for whatever reason. There’s an old version of WordPerfect, and lots of copies of Teachers’ Essentials, and, oh, a collection of Clipart that I had bought at one time! And, of course, the runtime application that would have run the interactive version of the Planner. The applications that are in this collection are long past their prime and might not even load for all I know. I really wasn’t interested in pursuing.

Some do go back to the Macintosh old days with “classic” applications. I still remember the angst that went on when Apple decided that it was no longer going to support them. We all had to find alternatives.

It appears that Macintosh users are going to have to do it all over again. At least, if you intend to upgrade to the next version of Catalina. I’m already getting the warning message when Jing or other favourites like Hyperstudio start that they’re not optimized to run in future versions of the OS. But, hey, it works now and I use it every time I need a screen capture for a graphic. However, the writing on the wall is there for 32-bit applications. Of course, I could just not upgrade but that’s not in my digital DNA.

Fortunately, in that article from Apple, there’s a way to check applications that haven’t been made ready for its future. You can check them out in the Legacy applications option.

That doesn’t seem to give the full list. But if you create a system report, there’s a column where you can sort by applications.

I’ve got a lot of de-hoarding right on my computer if I’m going to move on with the same functionality that I currently have. I think that, in today’s world, as long as my web browser(s) iare good to go, I’ll be largely good to go.

As luck would have it, I was notified that Mojave itself had an update this morning? Getting ready for an announcement later today?

But Macintosh school districts have probably accumulated lots of applications that are going to need to be addressed.

So, Macintosh readers, are you preparing for the future?