Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Michel Fortin · Nov 8, 2003, 02:22 PM

I found a strange thing today. If I open a menu, the front application stops running. The last version of Mac OS that did this was Mac OS 9. In Jaguar I could open a menu and see an image on a web page animating, but no more. Only Quicktime movies seem unaffected.

Is it a way to speed up things and make Mac OS X snappier? A step backward in multithreading, a step forward in snappiness!

Developer · 03:06 PM

Nope, no regression in Panther. Timers continue to fire with the menu down in both Cocoa and Carbon.

Must be a regression (or optimization?) in the app you're using.

bwahahax · Nov 8, 2003, 03:00 PM

While reading this post (Safari 1.1, Mac OS X 10.3) I realized that the ad on the top of the page was animated.

I decided to experiment and click on the File menu. Indeed, the animated gif image stopped flashing.

Personally, that's fine with me. I hate the flashing ads anyway.

Michel Fortin · Nov 8, 2003, 03:51 PM

Ok, I should have said I'm using Safari. It's not only the animation, but pages also stop loading. It's the same in Mail, if you select a big email and open a menu quickly before the email is displayed it waits you close the menu before displaying it. In Aquisition it's the same, it won't update anything while a menu is open.

I've found out something however: in Camino an open menu won't stop anything. iTunes is ok too. As I remember in Jaguar all these applications were still working with a menu open.

The same happen for a blinking insertion point in a text. In some application (the same ones) it stops blinking while a menu is down, but in some cases (Fire, Camino) it still blinks. My guess now is that Cocoa application compiled with the lastest devlopper tools stop working while a menu is down. My current version of Fire and Camino predate Panther.

Developer · Nov 8, 2003, 04:14 PM

Originally posted by Michel Fortin:
My guess now is that Cocoa application compiled with the lastest devlopper tools stop working while a menu is down. My current version of Fire and Camino predate Panther.

I don't believe you. Tried it. And you are right!

Why is that?

Michel Fortin · Nov 8, 2003, 09:16 PM

Originally posted by Developer:
I don't believe you. Tried it. And you are right!

Why is that?

Mac OS X frameworks try to emulate bugs and behaviours of older versions when they are bound to an executable linked with an older version. This is probably why it happens.

Anyway, the question now is: Is this a feature?!

jasong · Nov 9, 2003, 10:43 AM

I feel like Safari and Mail always stopped updating there interface when the mouse click was held down. The one thing I noticed though (and this still holds true) is that the rendering of the pages continues, it just waits until you let go of the mouse button to display.

It definitely feels worse under Panther though, I was playing a freeverse game the other day and the music actually stopped if I stopped to think while dragging a card. I've also noticed that processor heavy apps are suffering under Panther, like MacMame - performance is much worse under Panther.

-- Jason

pat++ · Nov 9, 2003, 11:54 AM

This is a regression of Safari v1.1 on Panther. I noticed this bug 2mn after having installed Panther. I opened a bug for this. It seems that they are looking into it. It definitely needs to be fixed. It really feels like an old OS 9 app. (Safari 1.0 did not stop loading pages/redrawing while the mouse was in the menu bar).

arekkusu · Nov 9, 2003, 03:22 PM

A more serious problem is:

1) start an application animating (e.g. iTunes visualizer)
2) drag another app's window around.

Result: background animation grinds to a halt. This didn't happen in Jaguar.

It doesn't affect Quicktime player but it does affect %99 of other apps.

G4Rules · Nov 9, 2003, 03:36 PM

I noticed when you are copying a large file, and right click for a contextual menu, the copy dialog freezes as well until you release the contextual menu... I noticed this too and was almost mind-boggled as I though OS X was supposed to eliminate blocking like this...

tooki · Nov 9, 2003, 03:52 PM

Well basically, OS X itself no longer causes delays like that. It can't do anything to prevent a less-than-diligent programmer from writing a program that blocks itself.

tooki

3.1416 · Nov 9, 2003, 03:59 PM

Originally posted by Developer:
I don't believe you. Tried it. And you are right!

Why is that?

From the Panther AppKit release notes (at file:///Developer/Documentation/ReleaseNotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html if you have the developer docs):

"For applications built on Panther or later, menu tracking will now run the runloop in NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode rather than NSDefaultRunLoopMode. This is consistent with tracking in other controls, and fixes a problem where an application could cause menus to get stuck onscreen by intercepting the runloop unexpectedly, eg. by putting up a modal panel while the user was tracking in a menu. This change means that timers and other runloop sources added only for NSDefaultRunLoopMode will not fire during menu tracking. If you want your timer to continue to fire during menu tracking, you should also add it to the runloop for NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode. One easy way to do this is to use kCFRunLoopCommonModes, although that also has the effect of enabling your runloop source while in NSModalPanelRunLoopMode."

I noticed the same behavior in one of my apps; to restore the Jaguar behavior I just had to add my timers to the NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode.

Michel Fortin · Nov 9, 2003, 09:22 PM

AppKit release notes can also be found online. Thanks 3.1416.

Some applications need to be updated now.

CharlesS · Dec 30, 2003, 06:19 PM

Holy crap!

There is not enough

in the world to tell you how I feel about this.

Fortunately there's an easy fix for the developers, at least. Thanks for the heads-up; it seemed to work to get Pacifist to behave properly, at least. But a lot of apps are going to be blocking now, since it is not really intuitive that one has to do this...

sodamnregistered2 · Dec 31, 2003, 12:23 AM

opened activity monitor

clicked File

it quit updating until I released

billy_2004 · Dec 31, 2003, 12:33 AM

The reasons your having problems is because your using OS X instead of XP. If you were to purchase a PC these problems would be eliminated.

CharlesS · Dec 31, 2003, 01:18 AM

Originally posted by billy_2004:
The reasons your having problems is because your using OS X instead of XP. If you were to purchase a PC these problems would be eliminated.

Yeah, because then we'd be too busy trying to find all our install disks and download sites for all our apps after having to reinstall the OS for the 3,248th time to worry about silly things such as these.

Thanks for putting things in perspective. I needed that...