beaTunes News

A couple of people have reported that when starting beaTunes 5.2.15 on macOS 10.15, they are faced with a solid gray window, showing only the title and the traffic light buttons (close, minimize, maximize). The actual UI shows up when clicking on the green button (maximize/full screen) and then switching back to the regular window.

This is a pretty annoying issue and a hard one to fix, as I cannot reproduce it, which makes me wonder how often this actually happens. Do many people see this? What do they have in common?

What's clear is that it apparently happens on a range of hardware models and that it is caused by a design change in beaTunes 5.2.15. To improve repainting and general appearance, beaTunes 5.2.15 takes advantage of a recent enhancement in the Java platform, namely the support for both transparent titlebars (apple.awt.transparentTitleBar) and windows using all available space (incl. the titlebar) (apple.awt.fullWindowContent). Of these two settings, the latter, i.e. full window content, apparently causes the glitch. One guess is that it has to do with the painting z-order, as described in this old Mozialla issue, but unfortunately that still does not give me a solution.

So for the moment, maximizing and then resizing seems to be the only remedy for v5.2.15. Alternatively, you can of course also downgrade to v5.2.14, available here, which does not use the two special settings.

If you have any insights into this issue or want to follow the discussion, please watch this thread.

Update

The issue has been addressed in v5.2.16.

Labels: macOS