FusionPro Desktop & Lion

Is FusionPro Desktop supported on Lion?

 

I'm assuming it's not since I can't get it to work now. Is there an ETA when it's going to be supported/ported over?

No, we do not currently Support Lion (Mac OS X 10.7). We're adding Lion support to FusionPro 8.0, which we're currently targeting for late this year.

Is there an update on the release of FusionPro 8 that will be compatible with Mac OS X Lion (10.7)? The last posted dated July 26, 2011 stated it was being worked on and slated to be released "late this year" (assuming 2011).

any betas we can test yet?

I'd also like to have an update on progress. Just invested in a big way in the Fusion Pro & Marcom Central platform, and my end users are all on Lion.

We have a release candidate of FusionPro 8.0 for Mac in QA right now. I'm not sure what I can promise in terms of a release date, though.

Hey Guys it's been 9 months since I asked last, when are you going to get this new version out? Most of my boxes are now on Lion and I'm being pushed to look around and see if there are other options out there.

FusionPro 8 with Lion support is now available:

http://www.pti.com/downloads/fusionpro/

So....Mountain Lion should be out in a couple of months. Do I have to pay another $500 to get the software to run on it?

So....Mountain Lion should be out in a couple of months. Do I have to pay another $500 to get the software to run on it?

I can't say for sure, but I don't know of any reason at this point why FusionPro 8.0 wouldn't work under Mac OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion). It's my understanding that the changes between 10.7 and 10.8 are not nearly as radical as the changes between 10.6 and 10.7, at least in areas that affect FusionPro (such as the removal of a key subsystem it relies upon, like Rosetta in Snow Leopard). We are currently investigating Mountain Lion, however, so there may be an issue we haven't found. Therefore, we don't officially support it yet.

 

If you want to try it and let us know how it works for you, that would be helpful to us.

Been using 8 under Lion for a couple of weeks now. Seems to work pretty well, though you can tell it's a Java app under the hood. A lot of non-standard UI behavior. A few things have carried over from previous versions:

• Can't copy text from BBEdit or TextWrangler and paste into rule Editor for some reason. Pasting from BBEdit results in a caret character followed by an underscore in the Rule Editor.
  
• Again in the rule editor, occasional flakiness with copy paste, where the copy and paste "go deaf" and do nothing.
  
• If you have two documents open at the same time, Fusion Pro will occasionally show you the Rules from the document you were previously in after switching to the current document. Something about Acrobat X's document focus is not transferring over to Fusion Pro.
  

That said, it works well for the meat and potatoes, and generating output seems noticeably faster than previous versions, even compared to running under Windows 7 with similar hardware. Nice job, all in all. Look forward to tweaks, polishes and fit & finish.

Can anyone running FusionPro8 tell me if the Macintosh text editor has the magnification feature like the Windows version has always had?

Been using 8 under Lion for a couple of weeks now. Seems to work pretty well, though you can tell it's a Java app under the hood. A lot of non-standard UI behavior.

It's not a Java app; it's a native Intel Mach-O app, written almost entirely in C++. And technically, most of the UI you see in FP Creator/Desktop isn't an app at all, it's an Acrobat plug-in (which has been an Intel native Mach-O bundle for a long time, as it has to be to match Acrobat itself). The change in 8.0 was to port the actual application part (FusionPro.app, which does the compositions) from a PowerPC CFM application to a more modern Mach-O application bundle running natively on Intel. This was not an easy undertaking.

 

But even though they're now both happy members of the native Intel Mach-O family, both the FusionPro app itself and the Acrobat plug-in are mainly built upon older Carbon APIs instead of the newer Cocoa APIs, which is why some of the buttons and other GUI elements have a non-standard appearance. We've done our best over the years to keep up with Apple's constant architectural changes, and, like most other developers, have had to completely recode and even redesign huge parts of our application to keep it working on subsequent versions of Mac OS, while still maintaining a common code base with Windows as much as possible. Even with all that work, though, we're still not using all the latest APIs, but the application does work, quite well in my opinion.

A few things have carried over from previous versions:

There are indeed plenty of things that have carried over from previous versions besides just the issues you list. We never intended version 8 to fix every single Mac issue, just to be able to run under a native Intel-only environment as Lion requires. FusionPro 8, of course, does also include a whole set of new features on both Mac and Windows (and some optimizations for Windows 7 as well, even though the architectural changes between versions of Windows aren't as radical as they are with Mac OS).

 

 

• Can't copy text from BBEdit or TextWrangler and paste into rule Editor for some reason. Pasting from BBEdit results in a caret character followed by an underscore in the Rule Editor.
  
• Again in the rule editor, occasional flakiness with copy paste, where the copy and paste "go deaf" and do nothing.
  

These are known issues, related to the aforementioned use of older Carbon APIs. We are working on updating the Text Editor GUI for FusionPro 8.1, which should make copy-and-paste work in a more standard way. As for the Rule Editor, that will probably remain until a later release, although we may take another look at that as well for 8.1. Hopefully these issues don't cause you too much trouble in the meantime.

• If you have two documents open at the same time, Fusion Pro will occasionally show you the Rules from the document you were previously in after switching to the current document. Something about Acrobat X's document focus is not transferring over to Fusion Pro.
  

We've been fighting issues like this for a long time under both Mac and Windows. Every version of Acrobat seems to handle the document activation notifications in a different way. There are fundamental differences in how the document windows themselves are handled between Mac and Windows, especially since Acrobat 8 introduced SDI mode on Windows, which became mandatory in Acrobat 9. I can't say that we made any changes in this area for FusionPro 8, but we can take another look at this for 8.1 as well.

That said, it works well for the meat and potatoes, and generating output seems noticeably faster than previous versions, even compared to running under Windows 7 with similar hardware.

We've also noticed a huge improvement in composition speeds on Mac in 8.0. The GCC compiler in Xcode is a monster when it comes to optimization, even more so than the CodeWarrior compiler was. Also, we're able to handle things like POSIX file paths natively with calls to BSD functions instead of relying on CodeWarrior libraries to convert them to FSSpec and call older APIs under the covers. But most of the improvement is due to running natively under Intel instead of in PowerPC emulation mode under Rosetta.

 

And yes, in some cases, the Mac version can be faster than Windows, although you will see faster composition times on Windows running batch compositions with FusionPro VDP Producer (Direct or Server) than by running interactive compositions from Acrobat with FP Creator (Desktop). And we're always looking for ways to make the Windows composition faster as well.

Nice job, all in all. Look forward to tweaks, polishes and fit & finish.

Thanks, getting FusionPro 8 out was quite an effort. We wanted to ensure composition parity with 7.2 as much as possible before releasing it. That's the most important thing to us: making sure the output that's going to be printed is right, more so than making the GUI perfect, although we do strive to keep improving that as well.

Edited April 12, 2012 by Dan Korn

Can anyone running FusionPro8 tell me if the Macintosh text editor has the magnification feature like the Windows version has always had?

No, the Mac Text Editor still does not have a magnification/zoom feature. This is due to a limitation in the control used to display the formatted text. This is a separate issue from the Intel porting required to run under Lion. As I mentioned in my previous post, however, we are looking to replace this control on Mac in FusionPro 8.1, and the new technology should allow for a zoom feature.

just upgraded a week ago and thankful I don't have to boot 10.6 just to use FP

 

only real issue I'm having (other than random quitting) is that in the tools, I can only see about 1/8" of the tool area. any ideas? see screenshot

 

[ATTACH]http://forums.printable.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=634&stc=1&d=1336153124[/ATTACH]

only real issue I'm having (other than random quitting) is that in the tools, I can only see about 1/8" of the tool area. any ideas?

 

I have seen this as well. My workaround has been to collapse the FusionPro Tool, Close the document, Re-open the Document, and expand the FusionPro Tool. That usually works for me.

only real issue I'm having (other than random quitting) is that in the tools, I can only see about 1/8" of the tool area. any ideas? see screenshot

This is not an issue specific to FusionPro 8, nor to Lion, nor even to Mac at all. This is an issue specific to Acrobat X (10), where Adobe changed the way that tools are displayed. Instead of each plug-in having its own toolbar, it gets a tool "panel."

 

I just use the "Quick Tools" dialog in Acrobat to add the FusionPro tool icons to the main toolbar at the top of the screen, as described here:

http://forums.pti.com/showthread.php?t=2448

 

(Note the date of that thread, which predates FusionPro 8 and Lion. As I noted, it's really an Acrobat X issue which manifests with FusionPro 7 as well.)

I noticed the issue with 128 barcodes. They don't compose correctly and the template needs to be composed on windows machine for them to look and work correctly.

 

Will this issue be addressed in 8.1?

good call Dan. I actually found this through some searching and was able to add the FP tools as well as most of my PitStop tools to the 'main' toolbar.

 

MUCH nicer and easier accessed IMHO. I'm a happy boy with fun software toys again