Catalina questions

I see with some anxiety the Catalina questions posted here and elsewhere, in particular potential incompatibilities. It seems 10.15 is a horse of a different color.

My work machine is a good ol’ iMac late 2011 which can only go up to High Sierra. But I am not quite ready to get the very latest one. I would love to, but insurances and taxes are snatching my money.

My 2015 should hopefully run Catalina, but frankly I don’t see myself working on it’s bitty 13 inches screen all day.

Is it viable to develop under High Sierra, and test on Catalina on the laptop ? What would be the possible drawbacks ?

My main iMac runs High Sierra and I do testing on Catalina. You need to do really thorough testing. Other than that I don’t see a drawback.

I develop on a 2012 MacBook Pro (macOS 10.11.6), and test on a 2015 12" MacBook running either Mojave or Catalina. Downside is transfering to code sign, only to transfer it back so I can upload it. Other than that, Remote Debugger works pretty well.

What do you mean Sam ? Signing has to take place under Catalina ?

Sorry for any confusion; to publish apps for Catalina they have to be signed with 10.13.6 or higher (for the new Harden Runtime option). So I have to transfer them over to the second machine to sign them.

But for testing my apps on Catalina, I use the remote debugger.

[quote=446789:@Sam Rowlands]Sorry for any confusion; to publish apps for Catalina they have to be signed with 10.13.6 or higher (for the new Harden Runtime option). So I have to transfer them over to the second machine to sign them.

But for testing my apps on Catalina, I use the remote debugger.[/quote]
Have you thought about sharing a folder between the two and having a daemon on the other that picks up and signs new items for you?

[quote=446757:@Michel Bujardet]My 2015 should hopefully run Catalina, but frankly I don’t see myself working on it’s bitty 13 inches screen all day.

Is it viable to develop under High Sierra, and test on Catalina on the laptop ? What would be the possible drawbacks ?[/quote]

Yes, I run High Sierra on my 15" MBP, but do remote debugging on a 13" MBP running Catalina.

The only hazard is that Save As can cause a crash on Catalina when remote debugging. To be precise, the app you’re running remotely will either crash if you try to ask the user to choose a location and filename using the SaveAsDialog or it will do nothing at all (no dialog). SaveAs works fine in the built app, just not when using remote debugging.

Feedback # 59484, verified. Unfortunately, it’s ranked #182, so…

Other than that, it works great.

Thanks, John. Actually, I installed Catalina and everything seems to be OK.

Quite a few of my old apps were not compatible anymore, but once they are 64 bit they should be OK. I just have to spend the time necessary to recompile some 15 different apps and test them under the new system :slight_smile:

@Michel Bujardet — AFAIK with the new APFS filesystem, you can create several logical volumes sharing the same physical volume. As such, you can have different versions of your system (if you need it) without the hassle of creating different fixed partitions.

@StphaneMons - I don’t have enough room on my poor little MacBook 2015 to do that, especially since I already have a Bootcamp partition. I could never figure how to use B4A-Bridge in a virtual machine, so Bootcamp was the only solution.

But what you say is quite interesting for a more powerful machine with plenty of disk space.

I hadn’t; thanks for the suggestion.
I had considered making the next generation App Wrapper networkable. So you could set-up one copy as a code signing server; then the other copies could submit the app & data files, the server would then do it’s thing and return the wrapped app + packaged files. It would be quite an undertaking, and I don’t know how many people would actually be able to utilize this function.
It would of course mean that we as developers don’t need to screw with production set-ups to meet Apple’s code signing requirements.

@John McKernon I have customers which have the same problem on Mac OSx regarding the Save as Dialog. On my own MBP is works fine so I can’t replicate the problem. Did you found a workaround? Are the MBS classes work as a good workaround?

Which version of Xojo?

@Sam Rowlands XOJO 2019R3

I can confirm It has to do with multiple filetypes. If I comment those out the Save as Dialog appears again. It is probably on some MacBooks a problem.

[quote=469426:@Coen Martinus]@Sam Rowlands XOJO 2019R3

I can confirm It has to do with multiple filetypes. If I comment those out the Save as Dialog appears again. It is probably on some MacBooks a problem.[/quote]
Oh boy, I look forward to that one (not).

Your file types; are they dynamically created when you show the dialog, or are they in a file type set?

I like to know this too. I also have customers reporting this.
In my case they are in the file type set.

Can anyone share a fix for this?

I wonder if it has to do with thread locking. The same as the color picker; in recent years Apple doesn’t like this any more, they prefer to use Blocks as callbacks for when the action has occurred (or an Action handler). Whereas the Xojo Open & Save panels lock the thread until they’re closed.

It’s possible I could extract the code that I’m using to display the Export dialog in HDRtist NX, which uses declares to show the SavePanel (because I modify the save panel). To test this theory.

[quote=469872:@Sam Rowlands]I wonder if it has to do with thread locking. The same as the color picker; in recent years Apple doesn’t like this any more, they prefer to use Blocks as callbacks for when the action has occurred (or an Action handler). Whereas the Xojo Open & Save panels lock the thread until they’re closed.

It’s possible I could extract the code that I’m using to display the Export dialog in HDRtist NX, which uses declares to show the SavePanel (because I modify the save panel). To test this theory.[/quote]

That would be cool. :slight_smile:

There is an example from Ulrich Bogun on how to show the dialog async. And - of course - the MBS plugin allows this, too.