Mac OS 10.15 beta 1 was released today and I decided to jump in for a quick look. Surprise … there are issues.
A relatively simple bug to fix is the fact that Yate preferences can’t be imported. This is easy to get around and will be in the next release which will be out long before 10.15 is generally released.
A strange new behaviour is that it seems as if TextEdit is the default OS application used to open HTML files….and it really messes up the help. Setting Always open embedded online help in Safari gets around the issue. This might be a beta bug or intentional. I haven’t yet tried to install Chrome (or another browser) and make it the default browser. If this is not fixed, we’ll have to force the files to load in the default browser unless the Always open... option is set.
As iTunes is not there, no iTunes interaction works. I’m assuming that iTunes interaction will still work if you update an install to 10.15. I did a clean install. I’m not sure if an older version of iTunes will work in entirety. The good news is that the new Music and Apple TV applications have an AppleScript dictionary which looks identical to that which iTunes has. The documentation wasn’t even changed and it still references iTunes. If everything works as expected, we should be able to interact with the Music and Apple TV applications. Having more than one application to deal with will necessitate some internal and UI changes. The new Podcast application does not have an AppleScript dictionary. Unfortunately, automation for podcasts will disappear … unless they can be stuffed into the Music application. The Apple library we use to batch extract iTunes PIDs does not work. It’s present but seems to be hard wired to iTunes. This necessary functionality will have to be completely rewritten and it will get much slower.
Of course as not everyone will update to 10.15, we’ll have to support iTunes as well as the new applications. 🙁
More when I have additional information to pass on.
— 2MR2