I fortuitously learned that sidenote, which went belly-up in Lion and was still dead in the water in Yosemite, has come back to life in El Cap.

And now that I've upgraded to El Cap I've discovered that Timer Utility, which suffered the exact same fate, has come back to life, too.

This having happened once was nice, but its having happened twice in a very small population (2 out of 2 in my case) seems to indicate that Apple has reversed something they did in OS X 10.7 - 10.10, so I suggest that anybody who's got some dead, beloved old (Intel) apps squirreled away dust them off and give them a run in El Cap; you may be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

(The resurrection of my two apps, which more than offsets the loss of my PPC apps, has made the transition to El Cap more bearable.)

Just to clarify, previously dead applications were resurrected by a change in OS X, not through an update by the developer?

I've noticed that the icon for dead apps has a circle with a slash through it overlaid on the icon. It should be easy to spot that change if the application is now functional.

Yes but that is not 100% reliable. It often means the application package is lost or damaged and the app just needs to be re-installed.

That's exactly what happened. (One of the apps has even been abandoned for a coupl'a years.)


I've seen that icon in situations described by joemike, as well as in instances of OS X version incompatibility, although that's not universal; it often takes trying to launch an app to learn that it's incompatible. (Edit: There was, however, no such icon associated with either of the two resurrected apps.)

I just went through my entire app collection and double-clicked every one of them to see what would happen, and I was pleasantly surprised.