ControllerMate Not Compatible with Catalina

This is a quick announcement for anyone who read my MS Sculpt Keyboard posts. I’ve been made aware ControllerMate does not work with Catalina in current version. Unfortunately, circumstances surrounding the app seem to suggest the developers either do not have a specific time table to support Catalina or do not plan to support Catalina.

There are two options for ControllerMate-only users: a. use Karabiner for the time being or b. postponing upgrade to Catalina. Karabiner is a superb application but with a caveat; it cannot grab non-standard keys, such as a calculator key. And personally, I cannot recommend postponing a major upgrade for an application with no time table to support a new OS. Unless your computer runs on specific environment which primarily runs only that application, it is better to simply look for an alternative app.

It took roughly 11 months for Karabiner to release a stable version when major kernel changes took place in Sierra. Given the fact that Karabiner was able to jumpstart the process with a beta version in hand, —i.e. there was a working beta version of Karabiner always available— I cannot say the same with ControllerMate. The website has not been updated since 2018. This commercial software is also written with larger scope in mind, meaning potentially developing from ground up will be a hardship.

Comments

  1. ”Unfortunately, circumstances surrounding the app seem to suggest the developers either do not have a specific time table to support Catalina or do not plan to support Catalina.”

    Could you tell us more about that, because according to a tweet by the developer Catalina support is coming:

    ”Catalina support is being worked on, but no estimate yet on when it’ll be ready.”

    However, that post is from Oct 1, 2019 and not much have been head since then. :-/

    • I believe the tweet you mentioned was one of the reason why I ended up phrasing it that way. The twitter account was not verified and hasn’t been updated for awhile, so I had to make-do with whether or not the information provided was up to date.

      There was also another support document from a manufacturer (not OrderedBytes, however included ControllerMate for their products) suggesting ControllerMate will not be compatible with Catalina. I cannot say if this was only intended to be a precautionary message, but considering B2B nature, I would interpret it as a lack of time table, at the very least.

  2. Ok, what is odd with my installations is that I have ControllerMate 4.11.1 running fine under Catalina on my i9 MacBook Pro, but it launches and immediately crashes under Catalina on my i7 Mac Mini…whussupwiddat?

    • ControllerMate does not support Catalina and forward. So I can’t say how it was working beforehand. The behaviors I’ve seen usually had ControllerMate launch properly but fails to grab any devices. I was able to find some threads talking about using homebrew cask, but it appears to be limited as well.

Leave a Reply to Rufus Cancel reply