I regret to report that on MY iMac, the macOS update is causing odd behavior in PanX, including the whole program slowing down and then becoming “unresponsive”. At that point I have to force-quit the application. This is a development NEW to the High Sierra 10.13.4 update, which was installed yesterday. Prior to that, everything was fine… I’ve forwarded multiple crash reports to Apple. I’ll let you know if anything changes… or if I can figure out what’s causing the problem.
I updated to 10.13.4 yesterday as well but have not seen any new problems on my end. I’ll keep checking as I go but it seems fine right now. I updated from 10.13.4 beta and am running on an older iMac.
I have a really BIG database, written in PanX from the ground up, but there are a bunch of little things that don’t want to work right with the new update, intermittent bugs that I can’t really nail down: sometimes procedures attached to fields don’t get called, sometimes IF/THEN and CASE/ENDCASE statements fail for no apparent reason… all that makes it really tough to get anything done, what with the annoying hangs…
… which MAY be related to the database file living in my iCloud Documents folder. I’m going to move the file back to my local hard disk and see if that resolves the problem with the hangs… it may be the “auto save” feature is bogging down with saving to iCloud. It was interrupting my flow before the new update (really BIG database, remember), but it never completely froze before.
As will be stated by others, Panorama was not designed to operate with data files stored in the cloud. I would expect problems with any file stored in the cloud.
You might also be more specific as to what is ‘BIG’ as that is an extremely relative term.
Upgraded to 10.13.4 overnight and quick run-thru of some my key databases this morning didn’t show any problems.
PanX has been working just fine with files stored in iCloud for at least 6 months, whether it was designed to do so or not… I credit Apple and Jim. The file size of my database is currently 821MB.
As an test, I have saved a copy of the file to my local hard disk, and I’m using THAT one to continue troubleshooting…
The only problems I have experienced prior to the most recent macOS update are lags due to auto-saving, which I would dearly love to turn off.
I began my efforts to figure out what went wrong with my PanX database by removing a multiple-clipboard program I installed about a week ago, Paste. I don’t really USE it, so I won’t miss it. That seemed to help PanX run. I also went back one step in my program development and removed about half a dozen Hide/Show pairs that I hoped would speed up navigation. The combination of the two things seems to have completely restored functionality to my PanX database. I’m beginning to suspect that the Hide/Show commands used the way they were in conjunction with changeobject actions MAY have caused most of the problems I was experiencing. I’m keeping my eyes open for strange behaviors when using Hide/Show.
The next step will be to put the files back in iCloud, but that can wait until after lunch and walking the dogs.
Hide and Show were deprecated back when Panorama 3.1 was released. You do like to live on the edge.
They were replaced by Show and EndNoShow.
Hmmm… according to the PanX Help files re “Hide”:
I’m seeing what you see. Panorama versions 3,4,5 & 6 all recommended that users use EndNoShow instead of Hide. It does appear that the Pano X ‘Hide’, after having been updated, is now brought back as a usable alternative for legacy databases. Use as you wish. My thoughts came from a previous decade of use.
That is true for Panorama Classic, which used a completely different internal mechanism for Hide/Show vs. Show/EndNoShow. In Panorama Classic, Hide/Show worked by "short circuiting the system’s internal drawing mechanism. Or at least it was supposed to work that way, but as was well known, it would cause crashes in some situations, so it was best to just avoid it completely.
The Show/EndNoShow commands instead worked by suppressing Panorama’s code that updates the display when data changes.
When Panorama X was written, there was obviously no point in recreating Hide and Show commands that didn’t work and caused crashes. So I implemented them simply as duplicates of Show/EndNoShow. This is clearly stated in the current documentation.
As I just mentioned, Show/EndNoShow works by suppressing display updates when data changes. However, they don’t have any effect on the changeobject statement. There is no way to make the effect of a changeobject display invisible or hidden, other than moving the affected objects off the visible area of the screen.
Since Panorama X uses standard Apple code for saving and loading files, I would hope that it would work with iCloud drive, just as any other standard Apple app does. The only caveat, which would apply to any application, would be to refrain from accessing the same file on multiple computers at the same time. I don’t think the file will get corrupted, but changes could be lost from one or both of the computers.
I’ve been working with Panorama myself since Pan3 as well. I’d been using NoShow and EndNoShow, like yourself, but when I read that they are now the same, using Hide and Show seems more appealing.
That said, they still don’t work quite right, and I had to remove them tor restore functionality. Thanks for your input…
Installed 10.13.4 yesterday. PanX feels faster for the most part. The only thing I have found wrong is that right clicking on the drag bar no longer gives you the Hide Toolbar option. Still has: Icon and Text, Icon Only, Text Only and Customize Toolbar.
Hide Toolbar is an item in the Windows menu and has the shortcut: cmd-opt-T