Whisper it quietly...

Seasoned visitors to my website, under whatever domain name it inhabits, will know my love of Linux and my loathing of all things Windows and Apple. Don't click on the thumbnail to this blog post, therefore, unless you are sitting down with a bottle of smelling salts handy.

I am a creature of impulse, sometimes, and when I was up in the loft getting down the Christmas decorations for this year's outing, I spotted a 2015 21.5“ iMac sitting forlornly in a spiderweb-encrusted corner and thought… why not? So down it came too, and its Debian installation was wiped and the machine restored to its El Capitan original OS, swiftly updated to the latest officially-supported release of Monterey. It looks nice enough: in fact, the retina screen makes text look gorgeous though twenty one and a half inches of screen real estate seems somewhat underwhelming. It's not a bad computer, though: i5 at 3.1GHz and 16GB RAM are decent enough. It's real drawback is the spinning rust hard disk that makes everything quite slow to load: an upgrade to an SSD would certainly improve things on that score. The star of the show is undoubtedly the retina screen, which makes text look gorgeous. I still find MacOS a complete mystery, though: perhaps unsurprisingly, as I must have spent at most… 16 hours or so using it in my entire life.

Anyway, a few years ago, I made Giocoso Version 2 run on MacOS for some reason or other that I now can't recall: I never bothered trying to get Giocoso Version 3 run on it, however. The thumbnail to this post tells you, however, that after a day or so spent futzing around with things, I have been able to get Giocoso Version 3.32 (the one due to be released early in December 2025) running on it. I don't entirely know whether it is worth having done so, as everyone who loves Apple will have long since moved on from Intel Macs to the Apple Silicon variety that I don't possess (and am unlikely ever to do so). But the job is done anyway: impulse is like that sometimes!

This may delay the release of Version 3.32 a little: I mentioned last time that I was thinking of releasing it a week earlier than its planned December 10th release date… but the code changes I've implemented to get things on MacOS now need testing back on Linux, to make sure I didn't break anything there. So I think the release date reverts back to December 10th after all. All zero of the thousands not clamouring to run Giocoso on their Macs will be grateful, I suppose!