Typing in textboxes sometimes fails in Yosemite (10.10)

Targets macOS
1

We’ve had reports from the field that users with Yosemite (10.10) are sometimes unable to type text in Xojo windows.

They can drag-and-drop text, and even copy-paste text, but it’s like the keyboard is not recognized.

The keyboard works in other windows (e.g. Cocoa windows in the same app, from dylibs).

Users with all sorts of keyboards are reproducing the issue (various layouts including EN-US, wired, wireless…).

We’re not able to reproduce this in-house reliably, and never on a development system.

Has anyone experienced that in their Xojo Mac Desktop app?

Thanks,
Philippe

2

We’ve had reports from the field that users with Yosemite (10.10) are sometimes unable to type text in Xojo windows.

They can drag-and-drop text, and even copy-paste text, but it’s like the keyboard is not recognized.

The keyboard works in other windows (e.g. Cocoa windows in the same app, from dylibs).

Users with all sorts of keyboards are reproducing the issue (various layouts including EN-US, wired, wireless…).

We’re not able to reproduce this in-house reliably, and never on a development system.

Has anyone experienced that in their Xojo Mac Desktop app?

Thanks,
Philippe

3

That statement implies to me that this is a Carbon app. Is that so?

4

Indeed are you using Carbon or Cocoa, Carbon IMHO is really getting left behind. Yosemite introduced several bugs for our carbon based applications that were not addressed before the release of the GM.

5

Yes, it’s a Carbon app at its core, and all new functionality is being added as part of a set of Cocoa dylibs. There is a Cocoa migration effort in place, but those things take time.

I was wondering if anyone else had seen this issue, and if so, how they worked around it.

6

I have not had the same issue (I also have a Carbon application which I had added in Cocoa functionality), however on Yosemite I have received error reports a plenty from various Cocoa functions as well as other weird graphical glitches (heck I’m even getting graphical glitches in pure Cocoa based apps).

I read this morning about many people having unsolvable Wi-Fi issues in Yosemite and the solution seems to be reverting back to Mavericks.

Out of 12 apps, only 2 have no issue on Yosemite. One of the two is even a Carbon application.

7

Thanks for that. I’m not overly concerned with graphical glitches, but when you can’t enter text it’s kind of a bummer…

We’ve now managed to reproduce this in-house. But it can take up to an hour of typing. Not so convenient for debugging…

I’ll post more when we have more.

8

Am glad that you can reproduce it… Typing for hours. Is it a Xojo text field or text area?

9

It’s a TextField. And we could not repro it all of Friday. Sigh…

10

Just a thought. Would it be possible that a TextArea did not exhibit the issue ? If so, maybe you can use one instead of the TextField. That will not change the imperious need to go Cocoa, but it may be a temporary fix.

11

@Michel Bujardet I doubt it will change behaviour since both TextArea and TextField inherit from TextEdit. And these really are intended as one-line text fields.

The only ones who know for sure what the differences are between TextField and TextArea are the framework implementors; maybe they can chime in?

12

It’s been a while, but I recall TextField and TextArea sharing the same implementation on Carbon.

13

@Joe Ranieri thanks, that’s what I would suspect. We also have a mixture of TextFields and TextAreas in some windows, and when typing stops working, neither of those respond to typing.

14

FYI there seem to be two threads on what may be the same issue. the other thread: https://forum.xojo.com/16957-textfield-typing-problem-in-carbon-app-on-yosemite