By The announcement of macOS Catalina at the 2019 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference marks the end of 32-bit application support in the operating system. When the new OS debuts this fall, if you install macOS Catalina on your Mac you will find that any 32-bit apps you may have on your Mac will no longer work. The move away from 32-bit architecture to 64-bit began with iOS transitioning in September 2017 with the release of iOS 11 and the warning signs of 32-Bits demise in macOS have been prevalent in macOS Mojave for the last year. Launching any 32-bit apps in Mojave results in the OS warning you that the app needs updating.
Apple’s move to a 64-bit architecture is important as it frees developers of the limitations of the 32-bit architecture, from both a software and hardware standpoint. 64-bit apps are ready to use the technologies of today and will also be ready for those of tomorrow.
Do I have 32 Bit Apps Installed on My Computer
If you are not sure if you are running any 32 bit apps on your Mac, you can check by using the following steps:
- Click on the Apple icon in your Mac’s menubar and select ‘About This Mac’.
- Next click on the ‘System Report’ button.
- Scroll down the left hand column to the ‘Software’ section and click on ‘Applications’
- You may want to increase the width of the window at this point so that the fourth column to the right is in view. This is the column that tells you if an application is 64-bit or not.To list the column in order, click on the column title ’64-bit (Intel)’. The 32-bit apps will be displayed at the top and are indicated with ‘No’ in the 64-bit column.
Making Choices
Now that you have found your apps that are 32-bit only you have essentially two choices:
- Not to update your macOS to macOS Catalina so that you can continue to run your 32-bit apps
- Contact the developer of your 32-bit apps and see if there is an update that is 64-bit ready.
- Find 64-bit apps to replace your 32-bit apps if there is no 64-bit equivalent of your app available.
What About iWeb?
As you may already know, or have found out through the above 32-bit app check, iWeb is a 32-bit app. Apple discontinued the product back in in 2012 although development had ceased in 2011 with the release of iWeb 3.0.4. This leaves you with two choices: to stay with your existing macOS or find an alternative.
Choices for iWeb Users Moving To macOS Catalina
If you are looking to move to macOS Catalina, we would, of course, EverWeb as the best replacement product. With Adobe Muse discontinued and Sandvox without development for over two years now, EverWeb becomes an even more compelling choice. Here’s some reasons we believe that EverWeb remains the strongest choice for iWeb users, and for anyone else looking for a website builder that give you the flexibility of design without having to code:
- EverWeb has been a 64-Bit app since 2018 so is right up to date with taking advantage of what 64-bit architecture offers.
- You don’t need to code at all. EverWeb’s drag and drop simplicity is like that of iWeb’s and its built-in features are usually only one or two mouse clicks away.
- EverWeb has SEO built in for better Search Engine Page Rankings!
- EverWeb is the easiest product on the market for building Responsive websites. One page design for all device types!
- Fully featured, integrated blogging is even easier with an iWeb blog import feature that only takes a few mouse clicks to complete.
- EverWeb’s easy to use interface will make iWeb users feel immediately at home. There’s a very small learning curve and the clean, modern look of EverWeb gives you an idea of how iWeb could have looked in 2019!
- You can host with your own provider or with EverWeb which is a very cost effective option and gives you more features, such as 404 Page Not Found and 301 Page Redirects, straight out of the box. There is also the additional option for end to end data encryption, via HTTPS, at just the tick of a box. For some EverWeb+Hosting plan this is a free option. For other plans, there is a yearly charge.
- Regular product updates. EverWeb gets new features and updates frequently throughout the year. iWeb users will gain boilerplate templates, responsive design, project file backups, SEO built directly in to EverWeb, animation effects, one-click publishing and much more. There’s always something new for your website to keep it up to date!
- You own the product. EverWeb is not a subscription service. The product you initially buy is yours to keep. With your initial purchase you also get a year of product updates and support. If you don’t want to renew at the end of the year, you still keep the product you initially purchased.
- And let’s not forget that there’s 7×24 support, 365 days a year if you have a valid user licence, a vibrant user community on the EverWeb Discussion Forum, and a host of third party widgets and theme templates available for every need!
Making the Switch… How Easy Is It?
Making the switch from iWeb to EverWeb will take some time and effort. How much time and effort depends on the nature and complexity of your website. Most of the conversion work should be straight forward and there are a number of iWeb to EverWeb conversion videos available to help guide you. As mentioned earlier, converting your iWeb blog can be done in EverWeb at the touch of a button.
If you don’t want to do the hard work yourself, you can always engage EverWeb’s Professional Services who can give you a quote for a website conversion.
The EverWeb Advantage
EverWeb is now in its sixth year with an updates every few months, a great and expanding third party market for widgets and theme templates and a user community where you can always post questions or suggestions on how to make EverWeb even better.
You can try EverWeb for free. You can even build a complete website in the demo version. The only thing the demo version does not allow you to do is to publish your site. If you purchase EverWeb, this feature becomes unlocked. You won’t lose the website project you have built either so no time and effort is wasted!
Time’s running out for iWeb. Now’s the time for change!
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Aloha,
I upgraded to Catalina operating system on my Mac and now I cannot access iWeb at all and now I found out that there’s no support for iWeb, so how do I get what’s on iWeb into Everweb?
Aloha Tina!
Thanks for the message. In your situation, the best way forward is to go to your published iWeb site and copy and paste over everything that you can in to your EverWeb project file. For images, I would suggest secondary clicking on the image and choose ‘Save Image to Downloads’ to save the image to the downloads folder or use ‘Save Image…’ to save the image to another location. Once you have saved the image, you can drag and drop it in to your page in EverWeb or to the Assets List.
Hopefully this way you will be able to get most, if not all of your site, into EverWeb. This is probably the easiest and most hassle free option for you.
I hope that helps!
Hi again Tina!
I also had a follow up thought… your iWeb files should be available on your Hosting Provider. In this way you can probably access and download media files such as images, audio, video etc. that you can then add to your EverWeb project file. Your Hosting Provider should be able to tell you how you can access and download these files.
The website in iWeb itself is stored in a domain.sites2 file in the Library-> Applications Support-> iWeb folder. If you need to access this, the easiest option is to copy that file across to a computer that has a running copy of iWeb installed upon it. If you take this route be careful not to overwrite the domain.sites2 file on the other computer!
The solution is cut and paste? What a joke.
I’m amused at the hard sell to all iweb users to switch to everweb. Touting all the reasons you should switch.
I can cut and paste to any platform. (Windows included) Cut and paste is ridiculous. With access to the webserver why isn’t there a direct import option?
It’s not like data and files in the webserver are in anything but standard formats, What am I missing (besides a ton of work)
Dear Neal
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate that having to reconstruct an iWeb website in any other product is best facilitated by a lot of cut and paste and manual reconstruction. That’s true for any product you consider switching too, EverWeb or otherwise. The difficulty is that iWeb as great a product as it was, it is a proprietary product making website conversion more difficult (websites can range from extremely simple to extremely complex). iWeb also broke lots of coding rules and so was not compliant to HTML rules. This makes it difficult to create an ‘import website’ feature in any product. If it were simple, every other website builder would included this feature. I only know of one product that purports to have an import website feature, but all that does is dump out a text file of all of your pages. The rest you have to cut and paste.
So, unfortunately, the solution is to cut and paste. The upside is that if you have a blog, this can be imported directly in to EverWeb. The format of the iWeb blog does make this possible. EverWeb also offers a service to convert your website from iWeb to EverWeb if you do not want to do it yourself.
I hope this helps to explain why no one has ever built a tool such as what you are looking for.