Future of LDD on MacOS?

[NathanR]

In the last few months, I've noticed that when I open LDD for the first time after installing an update to MacOS Mojave, I will be given a warning message from the operating system that says "Lego Digital Designer is not optimised for your Mac and needs to be updated.  This app will not work with future versions of macOS and needs to be updated to improve compatibility.  Contact the developer."

I emailed Lego customer service about this and received the stock answer that LDD is no longer officially supported, try updating your graphics card drivers, etc.  At a rough guess I'd say the problem is really due to Apple retiring the old 32bit libraries and phasing out support for OpenGL.  I'm worried that I'll wake up one morning, install a "critical security update" and suddenly find that ten years worth of lxf files have just become unreadable.  

Is there any way of getting a better answer out of Lego, to see if they will actually address this problem? Or do you think they will just abandon MacOS and make LDD a Windows-only program?

[SylvainLS]

LEGO has abandonned LDD.  Period.

There’s no update on the Windows version either.  The last updates were just part updates, for both OS.  People have had problems installing it on Windows 10 too.

You have several options now (or at least soonish):

• Install a virtual machine (Windows or MacOS) with an old version of the OS, but that could also become a(n even bigger) PITA in a few years when you won’t be able to easily find a VM that works for old versions of the OS.
• Migrate to another CAD, LDraw-based, like LDCad, LeoCAD, or even Studio, or not LDRaw-based, like MecaBricks, and use the internal LXF import  features or other tools like lxf2ldr.html to convert your old LXF.

[M2m]

I expect the next version of mscOS will still support ‚legacy‘ applications. But after that (so in 2 years) probably only 64Bit apps will work. There is still virtual box or dual boot to windows I guess. On Linux then also Wine and there is also a wine mavis port - for which I didn’t check if it works with LDD. By the way. Can you add a screenshot of the message. 

Edited February 20, 2019 by M2m

[NathanR]

1 hour ago, SylvainLS said:

LEGO has abandonned LDD.  Period.  There’s no update on the Windows version either.  

I was afraid of that... Though given the number of MacBooks that appear in Lego designer videos, and that a fair few of Lego's design team use LDD for prototypes, I had kind of hoped that an update might have been made in this case. 

Thanks for the suggested alternatives. Mecabricks is a brilliant website but it always troubles me that I have no local copy of the models/files, and I've been frightened of Studio ever since the brickiest review a year or so back mentioned it making MacBooks run hot and caused excessive battery drain (I killed my last MacBook with something like that...). I will give LDCad a try though.

1 hour ago, M2m said:

I expect the next version of mscOS will still support ‚legacy‘ applications. But after that (so in 2 years) probably only 64Bit apps will work.

I'm not so sure.  I think we are already on the "legacy" support for 32bit applications.  And with OpenGL on it's way out (at least for the Mac) I worry that a fair bit of the Draw software like Bricksmith, LDView, LDGLite etc will be failing soon.

Oh, and this was the error message you asked about:

Unfortunately I didn't think to click Learn more and I can't get the message to reappear 

[supertruper1988]

As others have said, at this point, I would move over to BrickLink's Studio. I have been working in it for a couple years now and it was a little weird at first but now I can use it better than LDD. Plus it has the ability to make instructions, upload directly to bricklink for parts ordering, and best of all, it tells you if a part is not available in a color.

[Alpinemaps]

2 hours ago, supertruper1988 said:

As others have said, at this point, I would move over to BrickLink's Studio. I have been working in it for a couple years now and it was a little weird at first but now I can use it better than LDD. Plus it has the ability to make instructions, upload directly to bricklink for parts ordering, and best of all, it tells you if a part is not available in a color.

I've been a Mac LDD hold out for awhile, but just this week, I installed and fired up Stud.io.  It took a few minutes to get used to it, but I've already converted over a bunch of my LDD files.  Really easy to do.

The features you mention are pretty cool.  And at least OOB, right there on screen - like the number of parts, and the cost even!  Quick one button upload to a BL Wantlist as well was really useful.

I haven't tried the rendering or the instruction making, but look forward to it.