Accessing if Pan 6 works in High Sierra

So has anyone tried Pan 6 in High Sierra yet???
Any problems with this new update to Mac OS?
Will we have at least another year to work with Pan 6 with this new system update???

No issues using V10.12.6

I am using Version 10.12.6 and yes it works fine.

But Apple is coming out sometime either this week or soon in the future with a new operating system High Sierra, which is a step up from Sierra.
Does this new system software work with Pan 6?

Has anyone had problems with it and Pan 6???

To be more clear, High Sierra will be macOS 10.13.x

I’d also like to know if Pan 6 works with High Sierra. I have no real need for PanX. The few times I try it I get a message that I have to pay some monthly fee. There appears to NOT be a trial?

I have no real need for PanX

Then why are you talking? — Sorry, I don’t mean to be brusque, and I grant I’m very much an outsider with little history or stake in Panorama. But it really irks me to see the sort of rude, thoughtless, idiotic, hurtful remarks people are making on this topic.

Let’s all just get over ourselves, okay? If you want to stick with Panorama 6, then stick with it. It isn’t going to break or wear out. It’s not like a car or a liver; it doesn’t age or rust. You could break it by upgrading your system; so if it means a lot to you to keep using it, then don’t upgrade your system! I have lots of software that only runs on earlier systems, and I keep earlier systems on hand for just that reason. Just keep using Panorama 6 in a system that works. You can use an older machine, you can virtualize the older system on a new machine — there are lots of ways to keep older software alive, and if you care so much, you’ll find one.

But once and for all, hear this: You must not expect Panorama 6 to be updated in any way, shape, or form, ever again. Ever. That’s never. Never, never, never, never, never. The update, the form in which Panorama is going forward, the work that has occupied every day and night of Jim Rea’s life for the past six years, is Panorama X. Panorama X is the only future Panorama has. It will develop and change and grow and improve. Panorama 6 won’t. That is reality. And a wonderful feature of reality is that it doesn’t need your consent. It doesn’t care whether you like it. It just is.

Hey Matt, why don’t you say what you think? :wink:

I think what gets people going in this direction is the general desire to support ProVUE and use up-to-date software, but then too, not everyone is cut out to be a early adopter/beta tester. Some people need things to ‘just work’. They are use to Panorama 6 working just fine and would like to use Panorama X as well going forward, but well, maybe it just isn’t ready for them today. There are things that are still being worked out and until Jim releases Ver 1.0, it just may not be for everyone. I’d like to see all Panorama 6 users move forward to Panorama X, but that will take time. Both on the part of Jim’s development, and of users finding reasons to move forward and take advantage of new features that are not part of Panorama 6.

There is nothing in Panorama X that I need, and quite I bit that I do need that is in Panorama 6. but not X. But there will come a time when 6 will no longer work, and so I pay so that Jim can continue to develop X so that I can have the things that I need when I need them. By paying, I have the ability to find out what is missing and to ask for what I want.

I am someplace in the middle on all of this. I have used Panorama for close to 30 years and my livelihood has been based on my Panorama databases. Over the years I have perfected the way I use Pan 6 and have found it very easy to use. I respect all of the work that Jim Rea has done, he has devoted his whole life to first create Panorama and now create a program in Pan X which will last longer than Jim himself.
I understand that there is a certain amount of work in utilizing a new database, especially Panorama X which is an entirely different program. On my level I still am finding ways of achieving things that I do on a regular basis with Pan 6. I understand that Jim has had to make changes to make sure that it works in the new Apple ISO environment but in working with Pan X with other Panorama experts, some ways that I have created in Pan Classic doesn’t work or has to go about differently in Pan X. Gosh even a little request like giving us a lookup wizard has not been put into new Pan X updates which someone else created for me and I am using, but I have to make sure to have that add on program anytime I want to utilize the Lookup feature.
That is the problem I have with Pan X that at 61 years old and close to retirement I have to totally change the way I use Panorama and change what I have used for decades. Of course your all saying that i can never change the system software and Pan 6 will work, but let’s be realistic how many years can I exist that way, two, three or five years???

We are going over two years since the first beta of Pan X came out and a lot of us spent $1,000 taking a class on learning how to use Pan X. The program now is a lot different and more polished than the program two years ago, Jim has utilized a lot of our thoughts and put them into Pan X. So that is the problem, Pan X is still revolving, changing so it’s hard to put in the time, effort and cost to really bear down on Pan X until things are set in stone.

I also would really like to see some sort of Panorama meetings/conventions that take place once a year. Yes there is this Discussion board, yes there is the internet, yes two years ago Jim ran the class over the internet, but until others see what you are trying to do it’s going to be hard for folks like me that don’t have a programming type of mind to switch from Pan 6 to Pan X. I also think it’s important for Jim to see how we utilize Panorama in our everyday lives, so hopefully we can have some sort of get-together in some place, probably Southern California.

Jim has done a wonderful job with Pan X, but now the battle is to get folks like myself to find it even more useful and easy to use. It’s very hard to take folks like myself and change our ways of doing things. I agree and understand Jim’s thoughts on not updating Pan 6 but at the same time I wish that there is a “easier” avenue for oldtimers to change over existing Pan 6 stuff.

I can tell you this, two years ago when I first used Pan X, I was very upset on how different it was, how much things were missing like simple transfering text over to Pan X which was impossible to do 2 years ago. But Jim has listen and made those changes and we are getting close to have the final version.

Just keep chipping away at it Sal - I’m 20 years older than you and I’ve managed to make the change so I’m sure that you can too.

Panorama X is a superb package and, once, you’re used to it, it’s a delight to use. And remember that this forum is always here to help you through any problem.

The annual get-together could be a great idea, although SoCal is too far for me.

Thanks for such a warm welcome mattneub. I was trying to ask a simple question but clearly I’m not welcome here. And nobody answered them anyway.

Sorry, Kit,

Nobody knows yet whether Pan 6 will still work with High Sierra. That’s why you haven’t gotten an answer. Of course you’re welcome, and if you look past Matt’s annoyance, you’ll see that he has offered some quite useful information if you want to just continue with Pan 6 indefinetely; and there’s still an active Pan6 user forum. Many people are still using Pan 6, at least until PanX catches up with things like having a server.

If you want to understand about the pricing of Pan X, it’s clearly explained in several places, and in my opinion, Jim has come up with an interesting, innovative, and fair way to pay for it. And although there isn’t really a demo version as such, $8 for a month of try-out isn’t that onerous, in my opinion. If you try it and decide you don’t need it, you don’t have to keep paying. I suppose I don’t really need PanX for most of what I do, but I sure do appreciate its new features…

Bill Conable

kit mosden

16 September2017 at 9:11 PM

kitmos
September 17
Thanks for such a warm welcome mattneub. I was trying to ask a simple question but clearly I’m not welcome here. And nobody answered them anyway.

logo

William Conable*, Alexander Workshops, LLC*
| Mobile: 509-270-7492
815 Villard St.
Cheney, WA 99004

www.alexanderworkshops.com

Designed with WiseStamp - Get yours

Thank you Bill. I only use Pan a few times a month for invoicing. I tried Panx out a year ago and couldn’t convert the invoice DB that I origianlly bought from Jim. Been using it for 20+ years. Guess I’m just not that interested in learning something new at my age for such limited use. I’l stick with Pan6 as long as it works and then decide.

Cheers,

Kit

As of a few weeks ago, that is no longer true. When you first launch Panorama X it now offers a 7 day free trial. The 7 days don’t have to be consecutive, they can be spread out over a longer period. Since Panorama X isn’t officially shipping yet I haven’t made a big deal about the free trial, but I’m pretty sure I did mention it here – I must have because a couple dozen people have signed up over the past few weeks.

This comment implies that there was a choice. Actually, there were two choices:

  • Abandon development of Panorama
  • Start over from scratch, the path that eventually became Panorama X

Clearly, some users wish there was a third choice:

  • Continue developing Panorama 6

But that choice definitely did not exist, as was confirmed by Apple at this year’s WWDC. Panorama 6 is still using the programming methodology of Mac OS 9 (pre OS X), and Apple is going to remove that methodology. So if the decision to make Panorama X had not gone forward, we’d be looking at the end of Panorama on the Mac in the near future. Fortunately, I started years in advance to make sure that didn’t happen.

Anyway, most of you probably know all this stuff already, but perhaps this will be informative to one or two.

To answer your question, I just downloaded High Sierra yesterday (10.13 Beta) and have Pan 6 and X. I started up Pan 6 for the first time in a long time and found no problems. I did not use it extensively, but started up some of my databases and looked around… seems fine on the surface.

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:

  1. runningtotal() in Panorama X annoyingly ignores summaries and hopefully will work like in Panorama 6 some day.

  2. total() did not always work reliably in earlier releases and that may be fixed some day.

  3. 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.

  4. 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 :slight_smile: