MAC retina version GUI issue
Hello I would like to report problems with GUI. I am pretty sure it is retina resolution related issue. I have big margins and borders in gui that some of buttons are missing or it is nearly un-accessable. I run OpenSesame 3.1 and OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 but I had same issues with since OS X Yosemite with any version of OpenSesame.
Comments
Hi neuropacabra,
That is a known issue, and sadly not one we can currently do anything about. The culprit is the module Qt4, which is used to create OpenSesame's interface. When retina screens were released (and even more importantly the scaling algorithms that they use), the company behind Qt was already working on Qt5. In this version all these issues are solved, but they never backported the fixes to Qt4, and say they never will, so Qt4 interfaces will always look ugly on retina screens (or any screens that use scaling; on high DPI display on Windows it also looks horrible).
I have a test version of OpenSesame running on (Homebrew) Qt5, in which everything looks great again (and another benefit is that OS starts up in roughly 5 seconds instead of the 30 secs that it takes with Qt4), but I keep having trouble packaging Qt5 in the OpenSesame app. My hopes are that Qt5 will soon be added to Anaconda Python distribution, which OpenSesame is based on since its last version and which is generally easy to pack. I know the Anaconda guys are working hard to make that happen, but they haven't released any version of Qt5 yet. Until they do, we sadly will be stuck with Qt4.
If it is a real problem for you, you could always run OpenSesame from source by installing all its dependencies with Homebrew. There is a guide on how to do this at http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.1/dev/fromsource/#installing-with-homebrew, although I admit it might be a bit outdated (as OpenSesame has added some dependencies over the last few versions). If you install the required qt5 libraries with
OpenSesame should automatically pick them up.
Hi sdchreij! Thank you for you help. I decided to not use nightly runs on my primary experiment computer, but it seems great with QT5 libs. You are absolutely right that QT4 looks horrible and starts soooo much long. What a shame, I love using OpenSesame. If there is any chance to help you to fix this let me know (i can do my best).
Hey neuropacabra (and anyone else with this issue).
I finally managed to create an OpenSesame package running on qt5 and I would appreciate it if you could test it on your machine, and tell me if it works as expected (also in relation to the GUI issues you mentioned in this post). If there are no show-stopper bugs, I hope to package the next official version of OpenSesame (3.1.3) for the Mac with qt5 instead of qt4.
You can download the first qt5 version of OpenSesame here.
(If somebody stumbles upon this post in the future, this link will probably be dead as it is only a temporary storage location. By then, all officially downloadable packages of OpenSesame (>3.1.2) should run on qt5)
Hey Daniel, thank you for your reply. But the link is not working?
Hi neuropacabra. Apologies, I had to move the file from that server. The working link is http://cogsci.nl/dschreij/opensesame-mac/opensesame_3.1.2-py2.7-qt5-macos-1.dmg (but I think you already found it)
Thanks Daniel it works like a charm but it is not linked with *.osexp and it set a lot of system files and my code files as default app, don't know why.
Yes, that has been reported here too. I know this is probably due to a mistake in the app's Info.plist file, but I haven't had the time to pinpoint and solve it, but I'll let you know (through the other post, as that is read by more people) once I do!