The next version of Colibri – dubbed version 3.0.0 – is still in development and no, it hasn’t been abandoned; it’s aimed for release in the coming months.

The main reason for the very long delay is a sum of multiple things, the biggest of which is what Swift 6 and SwiftUI have brought to the table. Colibri was started back at the tail end of 2016, when Swift 3.0.1 had just come out, and to this day it still uses UIKit with Storyboards. This has worked mostly fine up until now, but it’s been showing its age, and it’s time to take the next generational step forward.

Along with these changes, Intel support will end this year: macOS 27 will be the first major version of macOS that only runs on Apple Silicon – Rosetta 2 support will supposedly still be there, albeit partially, but it is unknown if Colibri will function properly with it.

Colibri relies on a few external modules that need Rosetta 2 to function. Two examples, among other structural building blocks.:

• ZXTune, which provides a vast amount of chiptune/mod/tracker music support
• BS2B, which lets many users listen on headphones without becoming nauseous

Since these modules don’t have proper Apple Silicon binaries, I took it upon myself to dig in and rectify the situation – which, honestly, turned out to be biting off way more than I could ever have predicted I’d need to chew.

In the end, though, I built the missing pieces myself and in doing so closed the gap and updated the module from its upstream source. The results:

• ZXTune jumped from a “frozen” 2018 state to a fresh build from just a few weeks ago – a plethora of bug fixes, improvements and new format support, all carried over while being completely native to Apple Silicon
• BS2B now builds in seconds and uses next to no processing power

That said, my aim is to retain the current look, feel and capabilities of Colibri as much as the new frameworks allow – the goal is preferably a seamless update, where the end user might not even realise it has happened. Sandbox bookmarks are a bit rough in that regard; I’ve had plenty of problems with them in the past, but I’m hoping that this time around, the current implementation will let them stay nothing more than an unpleasant memory.

Colibri will ship with Intel support for as long as Apple lets me upload a Universal Binary to the App Store.

And one more thing: Colibri is buy once, own forever – all updates are free of charge, including major versions like this upcoming version 3. I’m still baffled I have to say this.