As you are probably aware from all the news, the next release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) is about to hit “store shelves” any day now. But, as always, there are a lot of changes and therefore a lot of testing and compatibility issues that have to be ironed out by other software and hardware manufacturers. In order to ensure that your productivity is not interrupted, we strongly encourage avoiding the Lion upgrade until you can ensure that your environment is completely compatible. If you decide to move forward and run into a problem, please note that the “downgrading” process from Lion (10.7) back to Snow Leopard (10.6) could be time consuming and costly.
We will have more detailed information coming in the near future, so for now we will hit the highlights that we know will affect the majority. Below we have listed applications in two groups: 1) those that don’t work now, but are reportedly being updated by the developers for compatibility, and 2) those that will not work under Lion, and probably never will, as the developers don’t have any plans to update them.
Applications that don’t have full compatibility at this time:
- Microsoft Office 2011 (coming soon)
- Microsoft Office 2008 (should be coming soon)
- FileMaker Pro 11 (coming soon)
- Daylite (coming very soon)
- FinalDraft 8 (coming soon)
- OmniFocus (coming soon)
- QuickBooks 2011 (coming soon)
Applications that will stop working entirely:
- Quicken Mac 2007 and earlier (look at iBank as a possible replacement)
- QuickBooks 2010 and earlier
- Microsoft Office 2004
- Now Contact & UpToDate
- Some elements of Adobe CS4 and earlier
- Acrobat 9
- Many plugins for After Effects
- Many older Plugins for Scanners
- Older legacy printers
- FileMaker 10 and earlier
If you have questions about a specific application you use, there is a great resource you can check called RoaringApps.com. Please note that this is a community-driven site, not a commercial one, so in some cases, its information may be lagging a few days behind.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on this over the next few weeks and posting periodic updates, so stay tuned.
