macOS 11.0 | Successful Software

In my previous post I wrote about the trials and tribulations of upgrading my iMac to macOS 11.0. Here I am going to list some of the issues I know about deploying Qt applications on macOS 11.0. More issues may subsequently come to light.

The QFileDialog::DontConfirmOverwrite flag is ignored when passed to QFileDialog::getSaveFileName(). Which means that you can’t use this flag and handle the message yourself, or you will end up with a double warning. This seems to have been an issue since macOS 10.15. It still isn’t fixed in Qt 5.15.2. It is annoying, but relatively easy to work around. The Qt bug report is QTBUG-39791.

QMessageBox::information() shows a placeholder icon instead of the information icon:

It is only cosmetic. But it looks shonky and Mac users tend to care a lot about this sort of thing. I can reproduce it in Qt 5.15.2. I don’t know of a workaround. The Qt bug report is QTBUG-88928.

QMessageBox::warning(), QMessageBox::information() etc show the default focus button incorrectly. For example:

QMessageBox::warning( this, "App", "text", QMessageBox::Ok|QMessageBox::Cancel, QMessageBox::Ok );

Gives:

Again it is only cosmetic, but it looks jarring. I can reproduce it in Qt 5.15.2. I don’t know of a workaround. The Qt bug report is QTBUG-89133.

There are also some other styling issues. The Qt bug report is QTBUG-86513.

Dark Mode still doesn’t work properly for Qt apps.

There was an issue on macOS 10.15 where using QFileDialog::getSaveFileName() to save over an existing file could cause a crash. Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be an issue in macOS 10.11. The Qt bug report is QTBUG-83342.

Unfortunately issues with Qt on Mac are nothing new. I realize it is a big challenge for the Qt developers to keep such a large codebase up-to-date with so many continually evolving platforms. But the Mac version always feels rather neglected compared to the Windows version. I wish they would prioritise basic issues such as the above over adding whizzy new features, 80% of which most Qt developers probably never use. macOS 11.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and betas have been available for a while.

I would be interested to hear of the experience of other developers with macOS 11.0. Any other Qt macOS 11.0 issues I should know about? Please let me know in the comments.

It is always a bit of fraught process upgrading a computer OS, especially for a development machine with loads of tools and libraries installed. So I try to do it as infrequently as I can get away with. On Windows I generally buy a new PC rather than upgrade OS. However glitches had been reported in Easy Data Transform on macOS 11.0 (Big Sur) and I wasn’t ready to abandon my 2017 iMac, so I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade it from macOS 10.13 to 11.0.

The initial upgrade of OS was straightforward enough. But when I tried to run Qt Creator the CPU shot to 99% and stayed there, making the machine unusable. A glance at Activity Monitor showed that several XCode related processes were going crazy. After a bit a Googling I managed to find this magic incantation to type into the terminal on a forum post:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode DVTDisableMainThreadChecker 1

I was then able to rebuild my Qt-based products: Easy Data Transform, PerfectTablePlan and Hyper Plan using the existing installs of Qt 5.13.1 and Qt Creator 4.8.0.

I had to update some of the software I use:

DropDMG
Beyond Compare
SnagIt

Annoyingly, I had to buy an upgrade of SnagIt as the 2018 version doesn’t work on Big Sur. Even more annoyingly the upgrade costs nearly as much as a new licence, which feels predatory.

The Subversion command line no longer worked from the terminal, but that was easily fixed by adding /Applications/XCode.app/Developer/usr/bin to PATH in my .profile.

So far I haven’t been able to get the following to work:

XCode
Hammer4Mac

XCode 10.1 falls over if I try to start it. It says that it requires additional components and then fails to install them. I may upgrade XCode at some point. But I only use the compiler from the command line via QtCreator, so it doesn’t really matter at present.

Hammer4Mac is a static website builder I use to build the PerfectTablePlan website and a couple of other mini sites. I upgraded to the latest version. It starts, but returns ‘Build failed’ for all 3 websites. No clue as to why. I Tweeted the creator, but got no reply. It appears to be abandonware. If so they should really take down the Hammer4Mac website. I guess I will use it from my macOS 10.14 laptop and then eventually do the tedious job of porting those websites to Jekyll.

Hopefully I won’t have to do another major upgrade of macOS any time soon (I may buy a new Mac next time).