Betalogue

With the release of the 10.7.4 update, I can now report on this bug that I have been living with for the past several weeks, with my prerelease copies of the update obtained via the AppleSeed program:

Yes, that’s the search field in the top-left corner of the application’s main window. It’s the singlemost important control in the user interface of this crappy application, and it now has a black background that makes it impossible to read what’s typed in the field (also in black).

The only way to (barely) see what’s in the field is to select the contents, so that the selection highlighting colour (vaguely) reveals the black characters:

The problem also affects text fields in other dialog boxes in the application, but this is the main one.

Needless to say, I reported the bug to Apple as soon as I saw it, but they didn’t do anything to address it between the time I reported it and the final release of 10.7.4. In actual fact, there was another manifestation of the bug much earlier in the beta-testing process, which made the Grand Robert application totally unusable. I reported that one too, and it was fixed in the next build (but it might just have been fixed “accidentally” as part of more general bux fixing processes).

Then the bug resurfaced in this new incarnation in a later build, and now the software is out and the bug is with all of us.

The developers of the Grand Robert application have a pretty poor history in terms of OS X support, so I am not optimistic that, whatever the problem is, it will be fixed any time soon. Given the history of previous bugs that we have had with this Grand Robert app, I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular bug was due to poor application code and not Apple’s fault at all. And of course the market for the Grand Robert application is too small for Apple to really care. It’s up to the developer to make sure his app works properly.

Until then, we Grand Robert users will all be typing our search requests in the dark. Yey.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 11:31 am and is filed under French Stuff, Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.