Noooooo...tepad
So, I absolutely, positively had to buy myself a new MacBook Air with the M4 chip and the 15-inch screen today. I’m not interested in hearing any rubbish from you. I gave my old MacBook Air to Anna because hers was dying, so I needed a new one. The desk across the room had no MacBook on it, and it’s always had a MacBook on it, so I’m not going to hear any nonsense about me not needing to purchase this new MacBook for nearly $2,500. It’s a beautiful machine with a very nice screen and a very fast chip, and I’ll not have a word said against it.
Okay, just one word. I like to set my new computers up clean. It takes a couple of extra hours, but it means that all of the cruft that’s built up on the previous machines doesn’t get transferred across to the newbie. Unfortunately, one piece of cruft I’m going to miss is my old, simple Notepad app, which was called Notepad.
I thought it was a system app, but apparently, I bought it back in 2012 from some obscure little developer who no longer develops anything, and the last remaining copy I have is sitting on my M1 iMac. It’s a huge part of my workflow. It’s basically my scratch pad for editing individual paragraphs.
I went to install it on the new MacBook Air today and, to my horror, discovered it is no longer available. It’s not on the App Store. It’s not on the Internet. It’s nowhere. It’s gone. It is an ex-Notepad app.
Sure, there are a thousand alternatives, but none of them are as simple or as beloved as my old Notepad app. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do about this.
Looks like you’ve been sorted, but I’ll post my alternative solution anyway.
I had the same thing with Lightroom (pre-subscription, when they sold perpetual licenses). I used to just copy the .exe from one machine to another, and then let it update to latest version from Adobe’s servers.
But for my latest new toy / PC, I found out Adobe stopped supporting the perpetual license version years ago.
Started googling and found that others had done the work for me. The last perpetual Lightroom version is on the Wayback Machine! And contributors to various interwebz photography fora had exhumed it, posted links on said fora, and even worked out how to get it to recognise those 16 digit license codes without the app phoning home.
I can happily continue using my old software like the trailing edge techno-troglodyte that I am.
They add tabs to the notepad in Windows. How dare they.
I mean, it's good and useful after I grudgingly started using them, but I was not consulted on this change so I was immediately against it.
Also, you get what you get with a Mac and you better fucking like it.