Apple will ship macOS 26 later this fall. Usually they show the iPhone the second Tuesday in September with shipments the next Friday. I would expect that by that date the 26 series of operation systems are released. There is a small possibility like in some of the previous years, that macOS 26 is not coming in September, but in October when they may do a Mac related event. So either mid September or October, our clients will jump and install the brand new version. For a business, I would wait for the .2 or .3 release in the new year before putting it on production machines.

Nevertheless, our existing applications will look old in macOS 26. There is some work for Xojo Inc. to adapt their frameworks. Xojo needs to be adapted to build apps with the 26 SDK version, so the new GUI shows. Applications built using older Xojo versions will stay with the older SDK. Thus there will probably be a Xojo 2025 release in the fall to bring all the necessary changes in the compiler and frameworks. We may even get some new properties to configure this to some degree.

You can already change the SDK version in the app with App Wrapper. But then you may still need a few declares or our plugin classes to change a couple of things to make controls look right. It is possible, but some work.

For MBS Xojo Plugins we add new things as we see fit. Already we got a few new properties to NSSliderMBS, NSToolbarItemMBS, NSViewMBS and other classes. Just to make some new things available to Xojo developers.

If you have an expired Xojo license or old MBS Plugins, it may be good to get up to date. Maybe grab a new license at some sale later this year.

Since the translation layer for running x86 applications on arm64 on macOS, called Rosetta, may go away in a few years, it may be good to upgrade your applications to use the current Xojo version and build Universal applications. For any old Web 1.0 projects, it may be difficult to continue to run the Xojo 2019 IDE. I know there are quite a few projects still using Web 1 with development on macOS and deployment on Linux. Looking forward, the old IDE may not run anymore on Macs sold in 2029 or later. You may keep an old Mac around where it works or a Windows machine.

What do you think?