#videosynth

Sustainability and Our Priorities

Sustainability in computing is important to us. That’s why we have always tried to make Lumen compatible with as many computers as is technically possible. For instance, this year we kept Lumen running with nine different OS versions, including the upcoming macOS 12 Monterey. The oldest version we’ve been supporting, macOS 10.9, can run on hardware made in 2007 (before Barack Obama was even elected!). However, the limitations of supporting this large number of OS versions came into sharp focus in the past couple of weeks.

To paraphrase our friend Marc, “developing software means making promises that rely on promises other software developers made to you.” The fact is that Apple typically only supports the most recent two of their own macOS versions, even when it comes to critical security updates. Right now, this means 10.15 Catalina and 11 Big Sur. 10.14 Mojave hasn’t received any updates at all since July. You can imagine how difficult that makes it for small software creators like ourselves to keep our compatibility promises.

You may have heard about the problems caused by the Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate expiring on September 30th. Long story short, this led to services and apps across the internet ceasing to work, particularly on older operating systems. The largest software companies in the world, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all had to fix issues caused by this problem. The small, independent, third-party service we use to provide license key validation for Lumen also had an issue with it, but only because of a bug in older versions of macOS that Apple no longer supports.

This meant that some new Lumen users found themselves unable to activate Lumen on macOS 10.14 and below. Our licensing service has since released a workaround that we are including in Lumen version 1.1.2. However, as a result of them updating their system requirements recently, we also had to make the difficult decision to change Lumen’s system requirements to include macOS 10.14.

For us, this licensing problem forced us to take a hard look at where we are spending our energy. According to our calculations, at least 15% of all our development time has been spent on compatibility work, which is painful to even think about. We never know when a problem like this one will arise, or when it will be out of our control to fix it. Even when it is in our control, working around older OS versions’ issues can cause incredibly long delays while trying to get a release out the door. Every OS version we support takes time away from what we can do otherwise - we want to be spending that time instead building new features (like HD) and on supporting more platforms (like Windows and Native Apple Silicon), particularly ones that allow for more sustainable computing practices.

Updating Lumen’s Minimum Compatible OS Version to 10.14

We’re releasing Lumen 1.1.2 today, which fixes the activation problems due to the Let’s Encrypt certificate expiration, and also sets the new minimum compatible OS version to 10.14.

Importantly, if you have already activated Lumen on an earlier version of macOS, it will continue to operate as normal. However, you will not be able to receive new updates or deactivate/reactivate the app unless you upgrade your OS. If this will cause issues for you that can’t be avoided, or would like us to remotely deactivate your license so you can move it to a new computer, please reach out to us via email at support (at) paracosm.us.

Coming Soon: External Processing Guide

In the midst of all this, we do have a bit of good news to share this month. The long-awaited External Processing Guide is nearly finished and will be finalized and released in the next couple of weeks! We’ve had many requests for this and are very excited to be able to get it out to the world. Stay tuned and we’ll post again once it’s ready.

Up Next

#1: HD Output - This feature will allow for HD video processing in Lumen along with custom aspect ratios and remains our top priority.

#2: Improving Lumen Guides - We’ll continue improving the guides in step with releases moving forward.

#3: Windows Version - We’ve moved the priority of this up, given everything we outlined above. We don’t have an estimated release date yet, but it’s very important to us. 

#4: Audio Reactivity - We’ll be able to focus on this again after HD is finished and Lumen for Windows is released.