After 2½ years of work, we are canceling development of Citavi for Mac. Read on to learn why we made this tough decision.
When we started developing Citavi for Mac in 2009, we set three goals: First, Citavi for Mac should have the look and feel of a real Mac program and be a solid member of the Mac ecosystem. Second, users that have been using Citavi on Windows or in virtualization, such as Parallels, should be able to keep using their Citavi projects on Citavi for Mac. Third, Citavi for Mac should use the core of the Windows version to make development more rapid.
To meet these goals, we invested a lot of time, creativity and money, and built multiple prototypes on various technical platforms. Ultimately, we decided to use MonoMac, a promising project led by the lead developers of Mono. (Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET Framework that Citavi is based on.) Mono was financed and maintained by the well-known company Novell. Recently, however, Novell was sold. The new owner, Attachmate, chose to close the Mono division and let go all of its developers. The developers have founded a new company, but it is focused on mobile development (iOS and Android), making MonoMac an uncertain foundation for our program. Because of this, we no longer see a way to meet our goals for Citavi for Mac in a timely fashion while ensuring its continued existence. We are truly sorry to have to disappoint you after such a long wait.
So will Mac users never have the opportunity to use Citavi? No. For now, virtualization continues to be a good option, especially Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. We're going to concentrate on finishing Citavi 4, which will contain important and frequently requested features. After that, we plan to… no, we're not going to do that! We shared too much, too early, about the development of Citavi for Mac and set expectations that we now cannot meet. It didn't do anyone any favors. We're going to do it right this time by waiting until after the release of Citavi 4 to let you know what's coming next.