We have been experimenting with the new Golden Gate release of MacOS and our current recommendation is that you wait a while before upgrading your computer.

The first reason we are making this recommendation is that Golden Gate is likely to cause issues with some older applications you are running on your Mac. Apple is removing support for software compiled for their old Intel chips and this meant that a number of the tools we regularly use became more problematic. This wasn’t a “deal-breaker” but we anticipate that most teachers will have some old, much-loved app on their computers that might be more work to get running, or might not run at all. It will just be an annoyance for many teachers.

The second reason is more to do with our products and how they interact with Word.

The way Efofex products interact with Word is a little unusual and has required special “permissions” be given to FX Equation and FX Draw in order to be used from the Word toolbar. Golden Gate takes this to another level and just blocks our products entirely until you, or your IT people go through a number of steps. There is nothing that we can do to change these processes and they could easily prevent you from using FX Equation and FX Draw as they are designed to be used. We have no idea if these changes will be rolled back by Apple but we are recommending that you wait as long as possible before updating (assuming you have that choice).

Please note that the Golden Gate issues do NOT affect our new product FX Manifest. Yet another reason to consider using FX Manifest to create your materials!