Igor Pro Mojave (macOS 10.14) Support

WaveMetrics has discovered the following compatibility issues while testing Igor Pro 7.08 and 8.02 with macOS 10.14 (Mojave). We recommend that you do your own testing on a separate partition before upgrading your main partition to macOS 10.14. Furthermore, you may want to remain on an older version of macOS if any of the issues identified below (or the workarounds to those issues) are insufficient for your purposes.

If you encounter any additional issues, please report them to support@wavemetrics.com. Please use the Help→Contact Support menu item so that your system information is included in the message.

Please note that Igor Pro 6 and previous versions are no longer supported or maintained. If you are using an older version of Igor Pro and encounter any of the issues described below, we suggest that you upgrade to Igor Pro 8 or continue to use an older version of macOS.

We will update this post if further issues are discovered.

KNOWN ISSUES

ACCESSIBILITY ACCESS (EVENTS) SECURITY DIALOG

Versions affected: Igor Pro 7 and Igor Pro 8

Description:

Initiating a drag in certain places, such as the Data Browser and the Gizmo Info window, can cause an Accessibility Access (Events) dialog, shown below, to appear:

In our testing, clicking Deny causes no problems. The Qt framework that Igor Pro uses creates a fake mouse event in the process of dragging, and this fake mouse event is triggering the security warning. According to the Qt bug report related to this issue, the fake mouse event is not actually necessary any more. Therefore denying accessibility access to Igor should not cause any problems.

Workaround:

• Igor Pro 7: No fix is available
• Igor Pro 8: Fixed in Igor Pro 8.03 (and later)

DARK MODE

Versions affected: all

Description:

Mojave includes a new dark mode that is controlled from the General pane of System Preferences. Igor knows nothing about dark mode. As far as we are aware, Igor works fine if you choose dark mode, but the appearance of Igor doesn't change. The versions of the Qt framework used by Igor Pro 8 and earlier do not and will not support dark mode.

Workaround:

Use the default light mode

CRASH WHEN LOADING AN EXPERIMENT

Versions affected: All Igor Pro builds prior to October 20, 2018 (including Igor Pro 7.08 and Igor Pro 8.02)

Description:

Double clicking on an experiment in Finder or the desktop starts Igor and then tells Igor to load the experiment. For some experiments, Igor will crash after the experiment is loaded. Loading the experiment after Igor has started up works as expected. We do not understand why this happens, nor do we have an explanation for why only some experiments cause this problem.

Workarounds:

• For all versions of Igor, if you start Igor first and then load the experiment, Igor should not crash.
• Igor Pro 7: Fixed applications are available on the nightly build page. Use the Help→Igor Pro Nightly Build menu item to download the nightly build. All nightly builds dated on or after October 20, 2018 contain the fix.
• Igor Pro 8: Fixed in Igor Pro 8.03 (and later)

BOLD FONT STYLE UNRELIABLE 

Versions affected: All versions of Igor Pro 7 and later.

Description:

Text that is set to be bold is sometimes not displayed as bold due to a macOS Mojave bug. This seems to happen most/all of the time with Igor Pro 7, but rarely with Igor Pro 8. This can occur wherever formatted text is possible (formatted text notebooks, annotations, axis labels, drawing text, etc.).

Workarounds:

• Igor Pro 7: No fix is available
• Igor Pro 8: Fixed in Igor Pro 8.03 (and later).

SUBTLE TEXT RENDERING CHANGES

Versions affected: Igor Pro 7 and Igor Pro 8 (all versions)

Description:

macOS 10.14 uses a new font smoothing algorithm, and the version of the Qt framework that Igor Pro 8 uses has not been adapted to this new algorithm. This change causes some text to look slightly more bold or blurry compared to macOS 10.13. 

Workaround:

None.