Panorama X 0.9.004 Build 2586 Release Notes

Panorama X 0.9.004 is now available. You can download this new version from the web site, or you can simply launch your current version of Panorama X and let it automatically update. If Panorama X is already running, choose Check for Updates in the Panorama menu.

This release includes one minor enhancement, new commands in the Hide/Show menu, and a handful of bug fixes, especially some important fixes for brand new users who are opening Panorama X for the first time.

  • Revamped the Hide/Show menu by adding the new commands Hide Before Current Field and Hide After Current Field (of course they are recordable). Also, the Hide/Show Fields menu item now shows the current number of visible fields, as well as the total number of fields in the database.

     

  • There is new statement, ShowFieldsBetween, which makes a range of fields visible, while hiding all others. For example:

    showfieldsbetween “City”,“Zip”

  • Renaming (or re-titling) a field now works even if there are hidden fields to the left of the field being renamed.

  • Data entry of accented characters by holding down a vowel key then picking from the pop-up window now works correctly in data cells.

  • The Summarize & Analyze Dialog now works correctly with fields that have spaces or other punctuation in the field name.

  • Morph and Morph All Fields no longer allow a carriage return to be inserted into one line text fields, potentially rendering some of the text invisible.

  • Changed several defaults for brand new users. The Open View* dialog defaults to current database, not all databases. The Find/Select dialog defaults to current field, not all fields, and reset search criteria defaults to on, instead of off. All of these settings can be changed at any time in the preferences window.

  • If favorites get corrupted somehow, Panorama now handles that without error messages or other problems.

  • Memory usage window did not work the very first time Panorama was launched.

  • Fixed tool bar pop-up menus so that they would work properly with styled text in a menu item. This is used to display the field count in the revised Hide/Show menu.

  • When Panorama is launched, the Site License wizard will open any time there is no account, not just on the very first launch. Also, this wizard now displays correctly even when Panorama is quarantined (first downloaded from internet), and revised the way the new user survey is transmitted to the ProVUE server.

  • Minor documentation corrections.

Neither of my copies of PanX reliably updates automatically; and the Check for Updates menu item is usually greyed-out and doesn’t do anything if it’s not. This is not a new issue. Of course I can download the new version from the web site, but new users are going to be confused/frustrated if this doesn’t work. I know I’ve mentioned this several times before, and I’m pretty sure Jim replied that the installer is a 3rd party gadget that is out of his control and is normally reliable. Am I really the only person seeing this? It’s happening on two different computers (both running OS X 10.12.6). The 0.9.003 version did actually automatically update on both, but .004 is back to the old story. I opened and closed PX several times in hopes that it would finally catch, but it didn’t.

Hmmm.
Bill

Jim Rea

14 September2017 at 1:31 PM

admin
September 14
Panorama X 0.9.004 is now available. You can download this new version from the web site, or you can simply launch your current version of Panorama X and let it automatically update. If Panorama X is already running, choose Check for Updates in the Panorama menu.

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William Conable*, Alexander Workshops, LLC*
| Mobile: 509-270-7492
815 Villard St.
Cheney, WA 99004

www.alexanderworkshops.com

Designed with WiseStamp - Get yours

Mine have always offered the new version as soon as Panorama X opens.

Other than Bill, I don’t think there have been any other reports of problems with the automatic updates. The automatic update system Panorama X uses, Sparkle, is used by almost every major Mac software package that is not in the Mac App Store. Let’s take a poll, how has your experience with Panorama X update been?

  • Auto update works every time
  • Auto update works sometimes
  • Auto update never works
  • I disabled auto update

0 voters

What does Sparkle look at to tell whether the app needs to be updated? Is there some Sparkle doc that I could look at if it’s a problem unique to me to find out what’s going on and troubleshoot it? Or is it likely over my head (I’ll bet it is…)? It’s hard to figure out what it could be, especially on 2 different machines, but I’ve been having the problem (intermittently) ever since the beginning of PanX.

Bill

And, just to be perverse, Panorama just now updated itself on my desktop machine. > : ( I have no idea why it happened this time after refusing from time to time all day.

Bill

Jim Rea

14 September2017 at 10:03 PM

admin
September 15
Other than Bill, I don’t think there have been any other reports of problems with the automatic updates. The automatic update system Panorama X uses, Sparkle, is used by almost every major Mac software package that is not in the Mac App Store. Let’s take a poll, how has your experience with Panorama X update been?

Click to view the poll.

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William Conable*, Alexander Workshops, LLC*
| Mobile: 509-270-7492
815 Villard St.
Cheney, WA 99004

www.alexanderworkshops.com

Designed with WiseStamp - Get yours

Sparkle uses an RSS feed to check for new versions. Here is the documentation for Sparkle, however, I suspect it isn’t going to help you – it’s aimed squarely at developers.

https://sparkle-project.org/documentation/

Updating killed my PanX last night. Fired up the app and left it running until close of work. This morning both the app icon and its shortcut have a line through it and it shows the message that it is damaged or incomplete.

When I am running Panorma X from a laboratory computer, I run it from the Desktop. Prior to this update, I’ve always been able to update it from there as well. When I tried it this time, I got this message.

I don’t have permission to put anything in /Applications, so I created a ~/Applications folder, put it in there, and the update was successful.

For me, /Applications is read only, ~/Desktop is read write.

I’ve done some testing this week of Panorama X on computers at the local Apple store. Surprisingly, a copy I downloaded on Monday was still in the Downloads folder last night (they don’t allow it to be copied anywhere else). When I ran it, it offered to update, but then got the same error message you saw. BTW, that error message is generated by the code in the Sparkle framework, not by ProVUE code.

Nothing has changed on the Panorama end to change this behavior (and I haven’t changed the version of Sparkle used). Is it possible that the IT department changed the permissions on the desktop folder?

Why do you think this has something to do with updating? Panorama doesn’t update without user interaction? It is possible to configure Sparkle to do that, but Panorama doesn’t enable that option.

Simply this. You told us that an upgrade was available. You told us to start the application and it would update on its own. The application worked before the update. I opened no database nor made any change in my computer in any way. I left the application running for several hours. The application is now non-functional. I did nothing other than follow your instructions so my best guess is that it must be the update that caused it to cease working since nothing else has been done.

PanX is non-functional at this time and I did nothing other than turn on the application to let it update as directed.

Thanks

That is very strange. Panorama checks for updates only when it launches. If it finds that an update is available, it shows you the release notes and asks if you would like it to install the update. If you say no, that’s the end of it until you quit and launch again (or you choose Check for Updates from the Panorama menu.) As far as I know, It won’t just update in the middle of running.

If you say yes, a dialog displaying the progress of the download appears. When the download is finished, a button appears asking if you would like it to install the update and restart the application. If you say yes, the update is installed and Panorama is relaunched.

I don’t know what has happened on your computer. It does sound like you should probably erase the application and download a fresh copy.

Thank you. I did just delete and install again. The new version seems to be running. I did not ever see any alerts about options or buttons for upgrades. In the past, it would just update after you would announce an update. Usually the upgrade menu item was gray when I checked and things just seemed to happen automatically. Maybe my copy has always some type of flaw and it will work better now

Maybe this application is too advanced for my abilities. Sorry to have troubled you. I will just be quiet and continue my remedial studies of the older version. I wish your company the best for its continued success.

Do you mean Check for Updates in the Panorama menu? Is it gray now? It shouldn’t be. I just checked it on my copy and I am able to select it, when I do, it tells me that I am up to date.

No, I am sorry I gave the impression you were troubling me. If things don’t work, I need to know.

I probably have 50 or 60 apps on my computer that use Sparkle auto-updating. It’s always worked reliably for me with all of those apps over the course of a decade or so, but that doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. Sparkle has a reputation as a very reliable system, though. The consensus among developers is that you’re unlikely to be able to build something better than Sparkle on your own. The original developer of Sparkle, Andy Matuschak, was a programmer at Apple for many years.

autoupdate is an optional feature of the Sparkle framework, and it is an option (a checkbox) in PanoramaX’s update dialog, too.

So Bill has checked this autoupdate box some time ago, and PanX tries to install all updates automatically. That’s why the Check for Updates menu item is greyed out.

Obviously, in this case something went wrong during the autoupdate. Maybe a sudden loss of internet connection broke the download or the installation process.

How can Bill revert the chosen “autoupdate” setting?

For me, the check for updates menu item is always greyed out, except immediately after a successful update.

Bill Conable

So I think you have set that autoupdate checkmark, too, some time ago.
The question is how to revert this setting. I have not found a solution yet.

I think we’ll find the solution in the file

com.provue.PanoramaX.plist

and you would have to set

SUAutomaticallyUpdate	

from YES to NO, to switch back from autoupdate to “normal” updates.

From the Sparkle documentation:

SUAutomaticallyUpdate Boolean Default: NO. Enables automatic download and installation of updates. If set to YES, users will not be informed about updates, and updates will be silently installed when the app quits.

Unfortunately, that documentation isn’t talking about the com.provue.PanoramaX.plist file, it is talking about the info.plist file that is inside the PanoramaX application bundle. You can’t change that, it is only set by me in Xcode. Perhaps I should change that so that this option is not offered, actually it appears that SUAllowsAutomaticUpdates is what needs to be set to NO.

As far as I can see, the Sparkle documentation doesn’t document what items it puts in the com.provue.PanoramaX.plist file (by the way, this file is in ~/Library/Preferences). I looked in this file on my system, and did find 4 items set up by Sparkle at the bottom of the file:

<key>SUEnableAutomaticChecks</key>
<false/>
<key>SUHasLaunchedBefore</key>
<true/>
<key>SULastCheckTime</key>
<date>2017-09-16T04:12:36Z</date>
<key>SUSendProfileInfo</key>
<false/>

Maybe the best way to remove all of your sparkle settings is to simply delete the com.provue.PanoramaX.plist file. This will delete all Panorama related settings. You would have to log back in to your Panorama X account after doing this, and also re-set up any toolbar customizations, favorite databases, and any other preferences you have set up.

The other option would be to try to edit this file with a text editor or plist editor (which you are unlikely to have), and try to selective remove the Sparkle settings. If you try that, I would highly recommend saving a copy before starting the editing process. (Of course if you mess it up, you could always just delete it as I suggested above, and let Panorama create a new one.)

If William Conable or Bill Few is willing to send me their com.provue.PanoramaX.plist file, perhaps I can do a bit of reverse engineering to figure out what is going on.

Perhaps. But the download is signed, so Sparkle should reject it if it is corrupted. I don’t have a better theory, though.