We've been working very hard on Indigo 2022.1, and we'd like to share some progress that we've made.
- After investigating all possibilities, we have found a way to make this release support current plugins, most of which will just work. A few may require you to install some 3rd party libraries, and we'll help as much as we can with that. In order for us to get this capability into the release in a timely manner, it was necessary that we build it for Intel (x86) only. As you know, however, you can still run Intel applications on Apple Silicon Macs - they just run under Rosetta2 emulation. You will see the standard warning when you run Indigo 2022.1 the first time that it needs update from the developer, but that's perfectly fine. This is great news as our 3rd party developers won't have to scramble along with us to get their plugins completely updated to Python 3 for this release. Having 2022.1 be a transitional release was our original plan so we're glad we figured out how to make this work.
- We will be including Python 3, and all embedded and linked scripts will be run using Python 3. This most likely will not require changes for most simple scripts, but there will be some more complex scripts that will require changes. We've created a post that outlines what you can do now to check your scripts now to help prepare them for the upgrade. We've also created a forum for you to post your scripts that do not work to ask for help fixing them (much like we did with converting AppleScripts). We'll make it a priority to answer questions posted on that forum as quickly as we can (and our power users will help as well).
- We are working closely with some of our 3rd party developers (and will expand that list very soon) to help develop and test this release. Some of their plugins will be updated to support Python 3 and may add new features, and there are also a few new plugins which were enabled by the new Python 3 installation.
- We will be installing Python 2.7.18 and Python 3.10.2 using installers directly from the official Python website. If you have installed either of those versions on your own, our installer will just update to the latest version. You will not need to install it yourself, and in fact we really discourage users from doing it now or in the future as it could cause some subtle issues.
- Because of the pervasiveness of this change, we are taking a phased testing approach. We have a small group of developers who are helping us alpha test now, and we'll be expanding that list to other plugin developers, hopefully within the next week or so. We will follow that up in a few weeks (depending on progress) with a limited beta test with a small group of power users that we identify based on region, system complexity, activity on the User Forums, among other things. We don't have the resources or bandwidth to do a public beta, so the beta test will be closed so we can ensure that we can respond quickly to issues found during testing.
It is our internal goal to get the release out by mid April, though that will of course depend on how well the alpha and beta testing progresses. We really appreciate your patience and understanding as we struggle to overcome challenge. It's a huge amount of change under the hood, and our goal is to get the release to our normal high-quality standard with as little impact to our customers as possible.
We will continue to post progress here, and this will be the very first place we announce the general availability of Indigo 2022.1. We recommend that you subscribe to the Announcements forum by following the link to the forum itself, clicking on the green button with your username on it in the upper right corner and selecting Subscribe Forum. Make sure that your forum email address is correct to avoid missing any email updates. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for the forum by clicking on the orange icon next to the Announcements form in the Forum List.