Version 2.1 of TimeStory will require macOS Catalina or Mojave. High Sierra will no longer be supported. (Version 2.0.1 will continue to work, and I will continue to offer customer support if anyone’s still using it, but no new features will be available.)
Last year, when I released version 1.0 of TimeStory, I only supported macOS Mojave (10.14), which was the current released version at that time. I didn’t intend to support High Sierra at all, if I could get away with it!
But I quickly found potential customers and testers who had not yet been able to upgrade to Mojave. Mojave had introduced several new security features which proved to be disruptive, especially to how some companies’ IT departments rolled out and managed their Macs.
So in version 1.1, I added support for High Sierra. This wasn’t a difficult change, but it did require a little effort. For example, Mojave had introduced Dark Mode, and so, for developers, had added support for new ways of specifying mode-appropriate colors and icons. I needed to make the TimeStory code work both ways.
More to the point, however, I needed to add testing on High Sierra—even code which supposedly should work the same way on two platforms, using the same operating system functions by the same names, often doesn’t. And once Catalina betas began stabilizing, that gave me three platforms to test, one of which was rapidly receding in Apple’s rearview mirror.
High Sierra’s market share has been falling, and I’m no longer aware of any customers who are running it. That’s good, because after the 2.0 release, I found a very noticeable bug which only showed up on High Sierra, leading to the 2.0.1 release.
So, to speed up development, I’m officially dropping High Sierra support. (In preparation, I already removed it from the new free trial download.) If you’re a customer of TimeStory and still need High Sierra support, please drop me a note.
