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Apple Silicon

We watched the Apple WWDC keynote. From all the announcements Apple made, the one causing the most work for us, will be the transition to Apple Silicon, their own CPUs based on the ARM 64-bit design.

As the rumors were around, we expected that to come and look forward to see what they can do. We started already and got Xcode 12 beta and built our plugins for ARM. It works mostly and a few little adjustments are needed. Currently it doesn't link yet as libraries are still in need to be rebuild. We started to build various libraries and I can say zlib, openssl, curl, sqlite, png and others build just fine.

Building them doesn't mean everything will work, so we have to wait for a test device to show up here. But that may happen in the next weeks.

We will be ready when the first devices go to public and Claris or Xojo ship their updated applications to use with our plugins.

But such a change reiterates how important it is to work with supported applications, where some developer takes care and provides regularly updates. In the last 5 years, a lot of clients came back to ask for 64-bit versions for MacOS, Windows and Linux as all operation systems moved to 64-bit. Now quite a few will come back to ask for ARM versions later this year.

Update: It's Friday, 26th June and I am done. All plugins for Xojo and FileMaker build for Apple Silicon. Once the test Mac arrives, we can try them. The biggest plugin in space...
24 06 20 - 12:16