Mark2d,
Appreciate the update, I am hopeful that Apple has not done anything radical with High Sierra to prevent it to work. I am under the assumption that High Sierra is nothing more than an update on Sierra so if it works ok with Sierra should be fine with High Sierra. But of course can’t believe anything until we see people using it.
Then you haven’t read anything about the new file system APFS. High Sierra is much more then a simple maintenance update.
I have been using OverVUE/Panorama almost daily since OverVUE first came out in 1984 and have 33 years of OverVUE/Panorama data that I want to preserve.
The highest risk for Panorama 6 in High Sierra is indeed the new Apple file system APFS.
In anticipation of Panorama 6 possibly failing in High Sierra and in any case being obsoleted when Apple (understandably) enforces 64 bit apps in a macOS release after High Sierra, I invested considerable time to learn Panorama X prior to High Sierra.
So far, I managed to recode 30 procedures with a combined 3000 lines of code to a “nearly” common code base between Panorama 6 and Panorama X.
In each of these 30 procedure I resolved the differences in file extension with:
Extension = ?(info(“panoramaname”) = “PanoramaX.app”,".pandb",".pan")
In only 3 procedures I versioned code differences with:
if info(“panoramaname”) = “PanoramaX.app”
There are still some annoying differences that make me prefer Panorama 6 over Panorama X for now:
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runningtotal() in Panorama X annoyingly ignores summaries and hopefully will work like in Panorama 6 some day.
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total() did not always work reliably in earlier releases and that may be fixed some day.
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For large sets of data, Panorama X is 4 times slower than Panorama 6 but that difference will likely shrink over time as Panorama X gets further optimized.
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Crosstabs are not(yet) implemented in Panorama X and my workaround was to write a C++ app and an AppleScript to automate this feature for both Panorama 6 and Panorama X since a common code base is more maintainable.
Now I am ready with a more maintainable code base for whatever happens with Panorama 6 in High Sierra or in a future macOS release.
It’s usually not necessary to include extensions at all in Panorama programs. For example, suppose the current Panorama 6 database is “contacts.pan”. If your code contains
openfile "calendar"
Panorama 6 will automatically open calendar.pan for you.
Now if you convert that database to Panorama X, the same line of code will automatically open calendar.pandb, without changing the code at all.
Why doesn’t everyone do that 
This is the biggest problem in all of this, am I suppose to understand all of this stuff??? I just want to cruise along with the stuff that I have and make some minimal changes and magically have it work like it has for over two decades now. I am not a programmer and up to have to write a workaround in C++, whatever that is, frankly that’s ridiculous.
It frustates me and many others when we can’t find simple solutions to things which we have had for years. Last month I brought up a perfect example, for years I have found using the lookup command very simple because it guides me through what I want to get.
Now I have to go and fish out another Panorama file and use that to do my lookups. And frankly I have a good samaritan to thank for that who wrote the program and put it up on this discussion form.
I will admit that Jim is making things easier and things are getting added daily, but time is running out. If I can’t use High Sierra, then I will have to stop my growth in other programs just because I have to use an old system because I can’t figure out how to move my stuff over to Pan X.
I would say that half the stuff is moved, but there are other problems that have no answer like how I print up my database to make the books that I make right now for my client. I can’t and have talked with other panorama consulates and they are realizing that some of the things that I have done on Pan 6 is not easy to do in Pan X.
This is the third time in two years I have gotten serious about moving things over, boy it’s a lot of work and I am only halfway there. Just hope that High Sierra doesn’t have the problems that garnout detailed.
That was a joke, Sal. Guess I didn’t make that clear enough.
Again, not to sound stupid but I know nothing about programming and just want to be able to utilize Panorama in whatever form it is the way I have done for all these years.
The point I am trying to make, for Pan X to work it has to be as easy for folks like me. I know very little on programming and have been able to learn and use Panorama all these years.
I know that I will pick up Pan X also, but right now it’s still a bit foreign to me. Not as bad as 2 years ago, and this time next year I will be a lot better.
I can only hope that some of the reasons that made Pan 6 so easy can be done in Pan X. It’s getting there, still a ways to go.
I want to make another pitch for the four new videos that were recently added on the topic of transitioning from Panorama 6 to X. These are designed specifically to ease this transition, and I spent quite a bit of time working on these. I just looked at the analytics for these videos, and it appears that almost no one has watched them so far. So I can only assume that everyone here has fully mastered the transition to Panorama X (at least I hope so!).
I’m really confident that for a user that is brand new to Panorama (for example coming from Excel or FileMaker), Panorama X is much, much, much easier to learn than Panorama 6. Much easier. At this point Panorama 6 has a hodgepodge of features that were tacked on over 25 years. If you look around this forum, it’s filled with people that starting using Panorama & OverVUE 20 to 30 years ago, but almost no one that started using Panorama in the last 10-15 years. In other words, almost no one that started using Mac’s in the OS X era. Panorama 6 simply isn’t appealing to anyone that is used to modern Mac applications. It was well past time to clear away the clutter and develop a clean design. The limited feedback I’ve gotten for Panorama X from outside the long time Panorama community has been overwhelmingly positive. It remains to be seen whether that will actually turn into future market success, but as far as I’m concerned it’s an absolute certainty that without a clean break from old UI conventions Panorama was definitely on the road to oblivion.
Sad to hear your thoughts on having a clutter free, clean design. Guess that’s why you never put the lookup guide onto Pan X.
I understand your predicament on trying to cater to “old farts” like me that have used Panorama for over 20 years and your thoughts on trying to make Panorama X successful in other market places.
One suggestion and something that you did 20 years ago when you went from I think Pan 5 to Pan 6. I remember an update in which you changed everything around and everyone screamed at you on what the hell you were doing changing the interface so drastically.
If memory serves me correctly didn’t you have two interfaces, one a classic feel and the other the new interface???
Is it possible to do now???
I know the last thing in the world you want to do now is waste time putting in “a hodgepodge of features that were tacked on over 25 years” for us oldtimers, but is this possible after you catch your breath (which I understand is probably 20 years from now).
One major suggestion is on your videos can you put the dates that you have created the video??? I have ventured to the help file to look at the videos, and they are hard to figure out which one’s are new and which ones from the Panorama X class you had two years ago. If you had dates on the videos, that would help us figure out which one is new and which ones aren’t, helping us find them easier. Just a suggestion.
Gary, how did you find this???
I have tried and can’t find the list.
Again, that is the biggest problem that I have.
For you this is easy, but when I go to help and hit Panorama X video Training and try to find this “Open View” file, I can’t find it.
This is what I get
So I can’t easily find something like you guys seem to do.
It’s on the View menu.
In the View menu you will find Open View… as shown below.
You don’t need to open the data sheet. For now, just use the Curriculum men to pick anything but Intensive Training Course. Also, even if you have all videos displayed, the Intensive Training Course videos are at the bottom.
As even more new videos are added over time, I’ll probably add a way to select recent videos, as Gary and Dave mentioned, this information is already in the database. But now, since all of the videos are new except for the Intensive Training Course videos, that did not seem necessary, in fact, I thought it would be confusing.
No, that is not possible.
The “classic” mode was added in Panorama 6, when upgrading from 5.5. However, the reason that was possible was because Panorama 6.0 still included all of the old code, and it only took something like 15-30 minutes to add the checkbox to make the old code active again.
To add a “classic” mode to Panorama X, all of the old code would have to be rewritten from scratch. This would take at least a year.
Personally, it usually grates me when there is no reference to date created. On a Help response or a tech column of advice, the age of the response is most often relevant since things change. I don’t want the way to do it 8 years ago when there is a response of 3 months ago, yet all too often there is no date noted in an tech column on a web page.