Apple finally announced to all Mac developers that OS X 10.9 Mavericks is now available for developers as a Golden Master (GM).
Of course, this has some consequences over Lion DiskMaker as it needs many modifications to work properly with this final version. And I have to squash many nasty bugs due to changes performed in the way Mavericks deals with packages and its boot OS.
It means that it will take a bit of time before I can propose a nice version of Lion DiskMaker for 10.9. I plan to make a new beta available within the week-end, then work towards the final version for the official Mavericks release, which should happen before the end of October.
There will be also many substantial changes in Lion DiskMaker. I prefer to keep some of the new features secret for this time. But some of them should be really cool 🙂
However, I’d like also to use this blog post to talk about one feature you won’t see in Lion DiskMaker 3: DVD-R support.
Two years ago, I thought Lion DiskMaker was useful to build a bootable USB key, but also to burn a bootable install disk. It was okay at this time to use a DVD-R as Lion could fit in a single standard DVD-R . Today, burning Mountain Lion or Mavericks on a disk is not that easy , as the DVD-R are just too small to fit the full OS X install. So you need to use DVD-R Dual Layer (or DVD+R DL), which are waaaaaay more expensive. In the same time, USB thumb drives became ubuquitous, their price fell, and you can just get an 8 GB drive for a few bucks (about $7). Think about it: you can buy for the price of a few coffees a disk 16 times bigger than my first internal hard drive on my first Mac, almost 20 years ago. We came a long way, baby 🙂 And I have to admit that to deal with burning a disk using the drutil command line tool is just, well… almost impossible when done from Applescript, unless you accept not to have any feedback while the burning process happens.
So at this time, I won’t add the feature to burn a disk in Lion DiskMaker. USB, Firewire,Thunderbolt or eSATA drives will be OK, as usual (though booting on eSATA may not be supported).
Thanks everyone for supporting Lion DiskMaker. It became a hell of a software… I did not think it would go so far when I began to work on it in July 2011. I really can’t state how much I appreciated every feedback (and donation, of course 🙂 ) I’ve got in the last two years, and I hope that the next version will be even more useful for every one of you !
