#93 Alpha and Google Chrome

[Chris Skeels]

I have just observed the following strange phenomenom. Using AlphaCocoa Version 9.0a13 (PR13) (23) and Google Chrome Version 55.0.2883.95 (64-bit), if I try to open a web page from the Developer’s menu, say AlphaDev Web Sites > Alpha Home Page, then focus will shift to Chrome but no window will open. Similarly, from the LaTeX menu, LaTeX Help > LaTeX Home Page brings Chrome to the front but only in the menu bar as no window opens. Conversely, if I go to Help >Bug Reports > Create New Ticket… (say), then everything works fine.

I tried the same thing in AlphaX 8.2.3 and observed the same behaviour, although it helpfully gave the following error message in the status bar (here I was trying to go to the LaTeX Home Page from the LaTeX Help sub-menu):

Cancelled: Couldn’t coerce |http://www.tug.org| from ‘utxt' to ‘alis’: OSErr -1700

I don't know what it means but I wonder if communication is taking a different form when coming from the Help menu (the Sourceforge Bug Tracker is a recent innovation relative to the Developer and LaTeX menus).

[Bernard Desgraupes]

This is fixed now. The implementation of the viewURL service for Google Chrome did not use the right Apple Event: it should be GURL/GURL and not aevt/odoc.
The command Help ↣ Bug Reports ↣ Create New Ticket happened to work because it uses the urlExecute command instead of the viewURL service.

[Chris Skeels]

This fix does appears to resolve the problem on a machine running OS X 10.12.3. Before suggesting that the bug be closed I do have one remaining question. I have one machine that continues to run 10.9.5 and, on that machine, the URLs get seriously scrambled (at least when being sent to Chrome). For example, if I try to go to Developer > Alpha Dev Web Sites > Alpha Home Page, on 10.12.3 I get

alphacocoa.sourceforge.not

whereas in 10.9.5 I get something like (from memory, I don't have access to the machin at the moment)

http:///:alphacoco.sourceforge.net:

which, not surprisingly doesn't work so well. Is the message here that AlphaCocoa is only meant to function on more recent versions of OS X, in which case, should that be imposed at startup, or is there still something going on that needs to be resolved?

[Bernard Desgraupes]

My guess is that you did not update AlphaCocoa on this 10.9.5 machine. What you describe is typically what we got before the fix. I just checked on my laptop still running 10.9.5 and apparently it works as expected. No URL scrambling.

[Chris Skeels]

You’re right. Sorry for the noise. This bug should be closed.

Thanks, Chris.