Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Grand Robert: Temporary workaround

Posted by Pierre Igot in: French Stuff, Macintosh
May 18th, 2012 • 9:32 am

Last week I wrote about an incompatibility between Mac OS X and the Grand Robert application introduced by the 10.7.4 update. I then wrote an update about the fact that the Grand Robert developer is working on a solution.

Since then, I have received some feedback from Betalogue readers, indicating that, since the Grand Robert application was obviously based on Safari-dependent technologies, there might be a way to hack the application to fix the problem. Indeed, when you use “Show Package Contents” on the Grand Robert application in the Finder, you can see that the package contains a folder called “web” with all kinds of HTML and CSS files, which are quite clearly used to render the Grand Robert application interface itself:

robert-html

However, there does not appear to be an obvious fix for the black background colour in the search field. The “gr.html” file itself contains the main user interface, but a preview of it in BBEdit or Safari shows that the search field has a white background, as expected:

robert-insafari

So the black background colour is not caused directly by the HTML or CSS code. I had a look at the code, and I cannot see anything obvious that would cause a black background colour.

While I have some experience in web development, I am not a JavaScript expert. It is quite possible that the bug has to do with JavaScript.

In the meantime, however, a Betalogue reader has come up with a temporary solution. If you quit the Grand Robert application, add the following lines:

input
{
	color: white;
}

to both the “main.css” and the “dialog.css” files in the “css” folder in the package, and then relaunch the application, you will now have a white colour for the input text itself. Since the background is black, that makes the text somewhat readable again:

robert-10.7.4-fix

It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than having to type in the dark. Since we don’t know how long it will take the Grand Robert developers to release an update, we can use this hack in the meantime. Of course, it will have to be reversed (but removing the added lines) once the update is released — unless the update itself overwrites the fix and makes reversing it unnecessary.

Thanks to Yoto Yotov for the tip!


One Response to “Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Grand Robert: Temporary workaround”

  1. Betalogue » Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Grand Robert: An even better workaround says:

    […] week I wrote about a temporary workaround for the incompatibility between Mac OS X 10.7.4 and the Grand Robert application. The workaround, […]