Mac OS 'Catalina' quirks

[kasemir]

Phoebus still works OK on the current Mac OS 'Catalina', but there are some quirks.

File Access

New restrictions in Mac OS prevent Phoebus from reading the Documents and Downloads folders of the user who started it. The File Browser will issue warnings like these:

2020-11-09 12:05:22 WARNING [org.phoebus.applications.filebrowser] Cannot monitor /Users/xxx/Downloads
java.nio.file.FileSystemException: /Users/xxx/Downloads: Operation not permitted

The folders will appear accessible when checking the permissions via ls -l,
and chmod ugo+xr ~/Downloads makes no difference.

What helps is adding to the "Full Disk Access" section in the Mac OS Security preferences.
Note that you need to add the actual "java" program that Phoebus uses, something like

/Applications/CSS_Phoebus.app/jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java

Font Quality

Text on an external 'Thunderbolt' display that used to be as good if not better than on the built-in laptop display:

.. now looks like this:

[georgweiss]

For what it's worth, font rendering is slightly improved by adding JVM option -Dprism.lcdtext=false. Have not investigated potential drawbacks in depth. Quick smoke test on Windows indicates negative impact on font smoothing, but no discernible impact on CentOS7.