Counter display does not count down

[VictorEijkhout]

Regularly, the counter display fails to count down: it gets stuck at pretty much the time it comes up.

The actual blocking does expire, presumably after the time specified.

OS X Lion, SelfControl 1.4.

[VictorEijkhout]

The counter display also fails to disappear after the block resolves: I have to Exit and restart SelfControl.

[henrik242]

This was discussed in #36, but a solution was never found. I have a feeling that this is related to use of Spaces. Are you using Spaces, @VictorEijkhout?

[VictorEijkhout]

On Aug 14, 2012, at 7:29 AM, henrik242 wrote:

This was discussed in #36, but a solution was never found. I have a feeling that this is related to use of Spaces. Are you using Spaces, Victor?

Yes. Very much.

Victor.

[cstigler]

Hm, I'll take a look at this when I get a chance, if anybody has an idea for what could be going wrong here please let me know. I don't use Spaces at all, so I'm not familiar with how it works behind the scenes.

[longouyang]

I also have this problem on Lion and I don't use Spaces.

(Also, on Lion, Spaces is superseded by Mission Control, which AFAIK can't easily be disabled, since that's what implements full-screen mode for apps)

[ilTofa]

I see this one on Mountail Lion (10.8.2).
It is reproducible always (at least on my machine):

1. press "Start"
2. while "Loading" is shown (it's around 12 secs on my machine with a quite long list of blocks) change space OR have SelfControl lose the focus.
   If you don't have the app lose focus before as "loading" disappears (and the timer countdown starts) all works normally.
   The app works also when the timer is freezed so it's not so critical. If someone can point me to the relevant part of code I can try to fix it myself...
   I checked issue Fix freezing bug and more changes #36, that sent me to the issue Countdown hangs on OS X 10.7 Lion #15 (or something like that) that was marked "fixed" so probably it's not the same issue.
   (Thank you for the app, in any case!)

[rilian]

@ilTofa i am experiencing exactly same issue - if SelfControl loses focus after start click, and timer is not yet shown, timer gets stuck

[mathew-hall]

I've taken a look at it and it's due to the timer being created from a dialog it seems.

If the window doesn't have focus, scheduleTimerWithTimeInterval returns NULL instead of a timer and the updateTimerDisplay method in TimerController only gets called once. There's a kludgy fix to it in mathew-hall/selfcontrol@fa60308dd8, but it could be done far more elegantly - I'm a Cocoa novice.

[ilTofa]

@mathew-hall The fix seems to work. If we can limit the app to 10.6 an simpler fix is to use GDC and wrap the offending call into a dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(),^ { ... } ); call.

as in

   timerUpdater_ = [NSTimer timerWithTimeInterval: 1.0 target: self selector: @selector(updateTimerDisplay:) userInfo: nil repeats: YES];
});

in place of row 87-91 of TimerWindowController.m If we have to respect 10.5- compatibility, your fix is absolutely OK (IMHO). I think this is the case, you could make a pull request.

[cstigler]

Wow, thanks to both of you for catching that. I wouldn't have guessed that timers would fail in other threads, weird.

@mathew-hall Your fix looks fine to me! We do need to support 10.5 still. I merged your commit, thanks.

[VictorEijkhout]

I just updated to 1.4.4

Sometimes it works fine, but I've also managed to get it to a beachball state where just a white box shows up for the counter display.

Here's to hoping this screenshot transfers....

[cid:7946D8AD-0AF7-4425-9DFF-5AE3CB985012@tacc.utexas.edu]