Big Sur Workarounds

I finally upgraded my Mac from Catalina to Big Sur today and immediately started to regret it. Lots of small annoyances all over the place, including a few with NodeBox 3 (Mac version of course).

So far Nodebox works fine for me when I open it in a window. But if I maximize the app window so it fills the screen, some dialogs do not function properly - with disastrous consequences. The dialogs include Code Libraries and Document Properties. If you open these with the screen maximized, Big Sur ties to display them in a separate tab but something goes wrong. I could find no way to enter values or even close the dialog. Finally I had to force quit, causing me to loose some work.

There are at least two workarounds to this issue.

1. Don't maximize Nodebox to full screen. The dialogs work fine when the app is not maximized.

2. Open System Preferences, choose General panel, and in the final section change "Prefer Tabs" from "in full screen" to "never". Once you turn off Big Sur's auto-tab "feature", everything works fine. The downside is that you won't have windows automatically appearing as tabs in other apps, but so far that has not been a problem for me.

This may be a bug in the way NodeBox defines some of its dialogs; a bug only exposed because of changes to window management introduced by Big Sur. Not a big deal for now - once you know the workarounds.

Have any other Big Sur NodeBox users run into issues like this? If so, do you have workarounds you can share with the rest of us?

Thanks,

John

Jhon,
You can install a virtualbox and install a virtual OS of old one before the new version of NodeBox coming out.
aman

Aman,

I know. But over many years in tech I've learned there is no going back. You can resist the tide of progress for awhile (delaying upgrades as I have done), but sooner or later you must move forward or die.

Big Sur has some rough edges, but nothing serious. Since more and more NodeBoxers will be using it, I figured I may as well take the plunge and get used to it. Hence this discussion thread.

I do worry that the next OS (on Mac or Windows) may finally bring NodeBox to its knees. Frederik's recent upgrade did fix one problem introduced by a newer OS, and in the process taught him how to publish to newer security standards, so that keeps us alive a little longer (though the Windows side still needs another patch). Time will tell how long we can keep NodeBox afloat.

If you can fork NodeBox, that might be be another path forward.

John