When we updated Witch to 3.9.5, we did our usual internal testing before setting it free: Both Peter and I tested on our production machines running 10.10.4 (Yosemite), and in virtual machines running 10.11 (El Capitan) and 10.9 (Mountain Lion). Neither of us had any issues with any of these tests.

But after release, we heard from a number of 10.9.5 users that Witch was repeatedly crashing. We tried to replicate the crashes here, but didn’t have a lot of luck. From the crash logs, Peter was able to see that the crash was caused by some text handling code that works fine in 10.10 and 10.11. He spent many hours trying to work around this problem for our 10.9.5 users (we sent out two further betas for them to test), but in the end, he wasn’t successful: we can’t make Witch 3.9.5 run reliably in 10.9.5.

This means that OS X 10.9.5 users will need to install and use Witch 3.9.4. (At present, there are no planned new features for the Witch 3.x series, so OS X 10.9.5 users will have the same features available to them as users on newer versions of OS X. All new features will appear in Witch 4, which will require OS X 10.10 or newer.)

Here’s how to install Witch 3.9.4, and set it up to make sure you remain on Witch 3.9.4.

1. Download Witch 3.9.4.
2. Open System Preferences, right- (or Control-) click on the existing Witch System Preferences panel and choose the “Remove” option in the contextual menu. (You will not lose any of your settings!)
3. Open the downloaded Witch 3.9.4 disk image, then double-click the Witch System Preferences panel. You can choose to install for all users or just for the current user.

Witch 3.9.4 is now installed and should be ready to use. Witch is set to not update for users on OS X 10.9.5; if you ever update to 10.10 or newer, Witch will update itself—assuming you’ve left the “Check for updates automatically” box checked (on the About tab in Witch’s settings panel. So we recommend you do leave that box checked, to make sure you get the latest-possible version of Witch if/when you upgrade OS X.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2015 at 8:54 am by Rob Griffiths, and is filed under Products, Witch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.