nVALT 3.0, back from the dead

Software

Today is Halloween. For the ancient Celts, it was Samhain, the New Year that marked the transition from the bright summer to the dark winter, and the night when the souls of the dead returned to walk the Earth. Apparently, they aren’t the only ones doing it: every now and then on Halloween, even programs can rise from the underworld to which they seemed condemned forever.

This is the case with nvALT, which has been stuck at version 2.2 for many years and was at risk of becoming incompatible with the successor to macOS 27 Golden Gate next year. In fact, according to Apple, version 28 of macOS will remove Rosetta 2 support on Apple Silicon Macs, thus preventing the use of applications that are only compiled for Intel-based Macs.

On my M1 MacBook Air running Golden Gate, I have three applications installed that will soon become incompatible. I rarely use QGIS and it has probably already been updated, so I don’t care much about that. Abscissa is now just a (fond) memory, but I use nvALT every day and it would be a real hassle to lose it.

Fortunately, however, Brett Terpstra, the developer behind nvALT as well as Marked and dozens of other very useful macOS applications, has decided to pick up the program again to modernize its code and make it compatible with Apple Silicon Macs.

The result is nvALT 3.0, which Brett Terpstra himself describes as being truly back from the dead.

Important note. Due to the extensive changes made to the program, it is not possible to upgrade directly from version 2 to version 3.

This time a minimum of manual work is required: download the latest .zip file from the official program page, unzip it, and replace the old application with the new one. Once this step is complete, the application will resume updating itself, just like we are used to doing with many other macOS applications.

It goes without saying that nvALT 3 works perfectly and offers several improvements on the previous version. The only exception is the icon, which has lost much of its originality in order to satisfy the squircle jail introduced with Tahoe (should I point out which is the original icon and which is the icon in the jail?). Too bad!