OS X El Capitan and third-party software

I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS 9, but I haven’t yet upgraded my MacBook to El Capitan, aka OS X 10.11. I use a few oddball bits of software on my Mac, so I like to make sure everything’s up to date and compatible before doing an OS upgrade.

For El Cap, I’ve found a few items I need to review and make some decisions on. First, Bartender, which is a nice little menu bar organizer, has a new version out, and it’s a paid upgrade. Version 1, which I’m using, is compatible, but it would be better to upgrade to version 2, since v. 1 requires you to jump through some hoops to get it working in El Cap. The upgrade price is only $7.50, so I’ll probably get that.

TotalFinder is a Finder add-on that I’ve used for years. I’ve been using it for so long that I’m not even sure what the regular OS X Finder looks like. But I guess I’m going to have to find out soon, since TotalFinder isn’t quite compatible with El Cap. You can get it running, by turning off System Integrity Protection, but the developer doesn’t recommend that, and he’s not going to keep actively developing TotalFinder anymore. He’s recommending a few alternatives, such as Commander One, which is a separate file manager and doesn’t plug in to Finder. There’s a free version, and a paid “pro” version. I may consider it, after seeing whether or not the plain old OS X Finder is good enough for me. I know Apple has enhanced it a lot since I started using TotalFinder.

I’ve been using a little program called Trim Enabler to enable trim on my SSD, since I replaced the drive in my MacBook a while ago. Why this is necessary is a long story, but now, it can apparently be done with the “trimforce” command at the command line, so Trim Enabler isn’t necessary anymore. But the company that released it now has a utility called Disk Sensei which might be worth buying, though it’s not necessary. I can buy it as an upgrade from Trim Enabler for $10.

TextExpander is compatible with El Cap, as far as I can tell. I paid for the upgrade to TE 5 recently, so I should be fine there. LaunchBar should be fine too. I installed the latest update for that last night. My preferred VPN client, Viscosity, is up to date also, and is probably compatible with El Cap.

And I think that about covers the oddball apps that do weird system-level stuff that’s likely to break with an OS update. I’m sure Firefox, Evernote, 1Password, and Microsoft Office are all going to be fine. They’re all actively maintained and up to date.

So I’ll probably try to clean up the issues noted above this weekend, then maybe do the El Capitan upgrade next week at some point. I should probably back up my hard drive too. Which reminds me that I need to update Carbon Copy Cloner too!

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