Install Lite on Mac OS Sonoma (14.5)

[Skids]

Richmond kindly invited me to join you all swimming in the free pool so I have been having a play.

I have managed to get OpenXTalk 1.963.1rc4 Don't Panic edition working after applying the patches that are published elsewhere on this site and I have managed to load and save a standalone one of my more complex applications that displays PDF files and all appears to be working once I changed the IDE back to lighter colours. So thats all good.

Now I have turned my attention to Lite version 1.07.

The first issue is that I'm asked by the Read this first Application to enable "load apps from anywhere" in the privacy pane. Unfortunately Apple in their infinite wisdom have removed this option from System Settings in Sonoma so I guess that I will have to use a Terminal Command.

A Google search suggests that one of these two commands should be used :

sudo spctl --master-disable

or if that fails

sudo spctl --global-disable

I'm no expert on Apple Security so seek advice - should I use either of these commands and once Lite is installed will it continue to run if I enable the security feature (-enable?) ?

best wishes

Skids

[richmond62]

Apple do allow it, but they have shifted where you do it:

"In System Settings, click Privacy & Security. Scroll down until you see Security. Now you can choose to allow apps downloaded from either “App Store” or “App Store and identified developers. "

Googly-Woogly.

https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/86616-h ... d-ventura/

[Skids]

#Richmond - I was about to poopoo your suggestion as my privacy pane is set to the second option then I tried it and Lite ran o.k. and with a lot less bother than the "read this first.app"

So the "Read this first app" needs modifying as the warning it posts is confusing:

Screenshot 2024-08-01 at 11.35.52.png (14.19 KiB) Viewed 4723 times

the addition of "or “App Store and identified developers. ""

[richmond62]

I am running OXT Lite on MacOS 15 beta ('Giant Redwood') perfectly alright.

Also on MacOS 12.

But went through a lot of hoops and "huffing and puffing" initially.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I have managed to get OpenXTalk 1.963.1rc4 Don't Panic edition working after applying the patches that are published elsewhere on this site and I have managed to load and save a standalone one of my more complex applications that displays PDF files and all appears to be working once I changed the IDE back to lighter colours. So thats all good.

OXT DPE 1.963.1rc4 is about 9 months old unfortunately, I haven't had as much time to work on things in the past year (Thank goodness Tom Perry has kept things moving)...

But since you have 1.963.1rc4, I have the following comments:

OXT DPE 1.963.1rc4 should work in darkmode on macOS, it did for me on my iMac when I was running Ventura.

The binary patches should already be applied to OXT DPE 1.963.1rc4. They are only for fixing the crash when launching IDE and standalone apps on Sonoma (macOS 14). If you don't care about Sonoma or newer macOS then there's no need for the patches. Also be warned that the patches may be the cause of corrupted display of certain compressed images embedded into standalones.

more complex applications that displays PDF

Not sure what you're doing with PDFs that's effected by light/dark mode (shouldn't), but if you're on macOS you could try using OXT Apple PDFKit extension (comes in both Widget or Library forms). That uses same Apple PDF API that Preview.app uses to display PDFs, plus a few other tricks, but obviously that's not a cross-platform solution. How are you currently displaying PDFs, using the Browser Widget?

[Skids]

The very minor issue was the display of text in fields. At first the text was almost invisible but appeared once it was selected and then deselected. I only had a quick look just to confirm that I could build the app so did not pay much attention to the issue.

[Skids]

The screenshot shows the initial load of the app in the IDE when dark mode has been ticked in settings:

Screenshot 2024-08-01 at 16.11.48.png (182.53 KiB) Viewed 4695 times

Unfortunately the mouse was positioned in the field as the app opened which is why some of the text is visible. The field has a light green background colour set but the foreground colour is set to nothing. So I suppose that dark mode is imposing white text on the light green background and that running the mouse pointer over the field changes this back to black.

The safe option is to set the foreground and background colours of all fields.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

The screenshot shows the initial load of the app in the IDE when dark mode has been ticked in settings:

Ah yes, this is an issue for a few of the 'classic controls' where they don't inherit the proper colors from the macOS, and so are not displayed appropriately for darkMode. This effects many preexisting fields, buttons, etc. that have color properties explicitly set.
In DPE OXT 'distro' I have modified the default property settings for newly created controls with this problem in order to have defaults that look OK in either dark or light modes. I've also added a new-'classic' button control that has a default of a gray fill with white text label, which was an attempt have a button option that looks similar to the regular/native buttons on recent macOS versions.

The safe option is to set the foreground and background colours of all fields.

That's certainly a valid way to work around the problem. IMO with text/fields it is better to strip away any explicit color properties so that they inherit their fore/backColors from the operating system. When you do that a text fields fore/back colors automatically get swapped whenever the mode is switched from the macOS system preferences.

It would be good to write a handler that you could pass a stack or object name to and have it go through any controls or text to strip away explicit color properties or set them appropriately in an automatic way. It can get rather tedious doing that manually when you have a lot of controls to change. I just haven't had the time to write such a handler.

[Skids]

It would be good to write a handler that you could pass a stack or object name to and have it go through any controls or text to strip away explicit color properties or set them appropriately in an automatic way. It can get rather tedious doing that manually when you have a lot of controls to change. I just haven't had the time to write such a handler.

I think I could manage to write that; I have similar that aligns controls with a common root name by looping all controls.

I note that the two versions have some marked differences. For example the lite version does not show any documentation for widgets.

Talking of widgets both versions struggle with some widgets e.g. The widget hhColor is displayed but refuses to be dragged yet works fine in the demo stack that may be opened from the widget manager. Oh! Since running the demo stack the widget now drags as expected, while hhDate does not. LC's own calendar widget seems to work but is displayed in the menu as just default widget in the HHG version and a tiny grid in the Lite version.

My EkEventKit events reader works which is encouraging.

Nothing that is a show stopper and both versions are very useful - thank you.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Richmond if you invite someone here it may be helpful to let me know, if you give me a name to look out for, for activation. I'm just trying to prevent spam bot accounts here.

[richmond62]

Whoops, sorry.

I assumed that they'd use the same user name as at the 'other plave' and you could check against that.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

It would be good to write a handler that you could pass a stack or object name to and have it go through any controls or text to strip away explicit color properties or set them appropriately in an automatic way. It can get rather tedious doing that manually when you have a lot of controls to change. I just haven't had the time to write such a handler.

I think I could manage to write that; I have similar that aligns controls with a common root name by looping all controls.

It would be awesome to have such a contribution from a new contributor! I think the more people that work on this stuff the better it will become for all of us! Maybe even "insanely great" someday!

I was thinking of combining a few of my handlers (like I have handlers for loading and displaying GIMP color palette files), and there's community libraries for doing color conversions plus 'dark' theme detection on Win/Linux, and combining them all into a general colors or color/theming library.

Or maybe a into "general graphics library", then I could include functions like:
PointsListToSVGPath( graphic "Polygon" ), and my GIFToGIFArray & GIFArrayToGIF handlers.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Whoops, sorry.

I assumed that they'd use the same user name as at the 'other plave' and you could check against that.

Oh I do, mostly if I recognize the user name from the community, that's not usually your typical spam-bot generated sort of name.

[Skids]

I apologise if my forum handle confused me with a spam bot. I looked at other members on this and other forums and noticed that very few people use their real names and decided that in this age of identity theft that perhaps that was a good idea. Skids is a nick name that I picked up decades ago.

I'm UK based living in North Lincolnshire and am now retired. I started programming using a form of Basic running under CPM on a "Lynx Camputer"; my first useful application was a training aid for my course on the F4 OCU. It randomly presented Central Warning Panel (CWP) captions and other emergencies followed by the Bold Face Actions which had to be memorised. The app was an unexpected success with the ten members of the course using it most evenings as a group, each lubricated with a pint and given three lives. The first person to lose all three lives bought the next round hic!

I have dabbled in programming using high level languages such as BBC Basic, Pascal, VBA, AppleScript and Livecode. I tend to shy away from languages that litter the page with braces. I have dabbled in Objective C creating a couple of extensions for Livecode that access MacOS structures such as the EkEventkit.

Computer hardware wise I have recently purchased a new mac which is Arm based, this replaced a 2013 Mac book pro which I still own. I plan to continue using a version of Mac OS that includes Rosetta2, if that proves difficult I will run OpenXTalk on either my Macbook or on Windows running in Parallels on my Mac.

Before I retired I worked testing system softwares. I'm happy to help this project but I have never looked under OpenXTalk's bonnet, so I guess that I will have some studying to do.

best wishes

Simon

[tperry2x]

It's good to have you aboard! - quite an impressive résumé!
With your objective-C knowledge, Paul and myself may ask if you would be willing to look at Stacksmith's engine underpinnings, with a view to moving them to C++

*I've not even got permission from the developer of Stacksmith yet, so this is highly speculative and (partially) meant in jest.

[Skids]

With your objective-C knowledge, Paul and myself may ask if you would be willing to look at Stacksmith's engine underpinnings, with a view to moving them to C++

ho ho ho......

[OpenXTalkPaul]

It's good to have you aboard! - quite an impressive résumé!
With your objective-C knowledge, Paul and myself may ask if you would be willing to look at Stacksmith's engine underpinnings, with a view to moving them to C++

*I've not even got permission from the developer of Stacksmith yet, so this is highly speculative and (partially) meant in jest.

I'm pretty sure Uli purposefully built StackSmith in a way that could be ported to another UI toolkit, and the language (Hammersmith) interpreter part is already written in C++ if I recall correctly. There's pages of info for devs on his StackSmith website that detail the API created for in SM engine/Hammer script. He hangs out on the HyperCard discord server, you might be able to get in touch with him on there.

I mean personally I'd want StackSmith to continue using Objective C for its UI and Media playing stuff, in any macOS build of it.

Someone could maybe try just building it for Linux linked against GNUStep, that should have most of the needed compatible components, like NSWindow, NSButton, etc. that would make it much easier to port (which indeed is a part of the value of GNUStep existing).

BTW, Uli has some really interesting (if not super exciting) videos up on youtube on topics like building a language compiler, and dissecting the HyperCard based original Myst game.

[FourthWorld]

BTW, Uli has some really interesting (if not super exciting) videos up on youtube on topics like building a language compiler, and dissecting the HyperCard based original Mist game.

Uli also does live playthroughs of his favorite games on Twitch.

This Sunday he'll play Mass Effect: Andromeda
https://www.twitch.tv/uliwitness/schedu ... 5915f9e44f

[tperry2x]

Uli also does live playthroughs of his favorite games on Twitch.
This Sunday he'll play Mass Effect: Andromeda
https://www.twitch.tv/uliwitness/schedu ... 5915f9e44f

Any chance a "Twitcher" (if that's the term) can drop him a note at the end of the playthrough, asking if he could cast an eye over proceedings here?

[FourthWorld]

Uli also does live playthroughs of his favorite games on Twitch.
This Sunday he'll play Mass Effect: Andromeda
https://www.twitch.tv/uliwitness/schedu ... 5915f9e44f

Any chance a "Twitcher" (if that's the term) can drop him a note at the end of the playthrough, asking if he could cast an eye over proceedings here?

Twitch comments are open to everyone.