Flexible Retirement Planner Support Forum

To begin: this appears to be a different (and much less significant) problem than this post:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1224


I've run into a small cosmetic problem with the MacOS version of the FRP stand-alone program.
It involves the main window's Summary View/Detailed View buttons and I wondered if anyone else sees this.
Especially of interest is how the buttons' typefaces compare in the stand alone PC+Java version compared to the stand alone MacOS+Java version.

The attached screen shot uses an obnoxious red box I added around the offending buttons for clarity. Whichever is the clicked button displays an almost unreadable ghosted or outline-only white typeface.

In my attached image I clicked the FRP's Summary View button. If I had clicked the adjacent Detailed View button instead, that button would have become barely readable and the Summary View button would revert to a clear black typeface.

This problem persists no matter which scenario or .frp file is loaded. It is always immediately apparent as soon as FRP starts.

Interestingly, the same poor, clicked-button-visibility issue also shows up in the MacOS Java control panel (Apple>System Preferences...>Java). The problem is visible in that control panel's top level 5-button horizontal menu.

As the control panel is also a little stand alone Java program, I assume the problem lies with Java not FRP.
Since I have recently upgraded to the most recent MacOS (Big Sur) and updated Java, I am suspicious that one or both of those changes plays a part too.

This bear repeating: the button readability issue described here appears to be a Java problem, not inherently FRP's.

FYI:
I'm using MacOS Big Sur version 11.1 on a MacBook Air (11 inch, Early 2015).
I'm using Java version 8 update 271.
Flexible Retirement Planner version 4.03.03.

For what it's worth:

MacOS troubleshooting:
Things I tried that didn't solve the ghosted font problem:
Reset SMC
Reset PRAM
Toggled dark/light mode on and off and changed highlight font colors (in Apple>System Preference>General Control Panel)
Cycled though multiple display resolutions to see if this is a resolution artifact.
Verified my font set using the MacOS Font Book app to see if this is a corrupted font problem.
Restarted in Safe Mode boot and ran Java + FRP with same result. (This clears font caches, kernel caches, and system caches.)

FRP troubleshooting:
Downloaded and reinstalled FRP (Version 4.03.03; Build date 7-10-2020)
Tried different FRP settings in Configure Display Scaling…

Java troubleshooting:
Uninstalled then reinstalled Java itself

I recognize that this "problem" is basically cosmetic. And there are no other buttons in FRP of this type so this is the only place where this unreadability occurs. (And yes I recognize it's just toggling between the same two words...)

I just though maybe someone could throw light on this.

Jim, as always, thanks for your wonder financial tool and hard work over many years.

Thanks for your time,
Red Head

If you click on the image below it will become much cleared and the unreadability issue more obvious.

Thanks for this excellent writeup and all the troubleshooting you've done. As you say, it seems to be some sort of incompatibility between the native MacOS theme and Java, and not really and FRP issue.

One slight technical clarification in case this matters to someone else reading this, the greyed out text you're seeing is on a Java "tab" rather than a button. Usually, the active tab is highlighted and the non-active tabs (in a set) are not highlighted. From your image, it looks like all the buttons render ok.

Here's how it looks on the latest update to Windows 10.

Jim,

Yeah I noticed that the browser version rendered those as tabs instead of buttons. I just called them buttons because they didn't appear as left justified tabs so I assumed they were Java buttons.

While I've got you: do you know the type face used for those Summary View/Detailed View tabs? I was thinking I could try substituting a different system font and see if that had any effect.....

Red Head

That panel just uses the default font type for a Java JTabbedPane Object. I believe this is a system dependent thing.

There is some code to set the font size to 12 and the style to "PLAIN," but it doesn't mess with the font type at all.

Jim,

As usual you're right, this time about the tab background artifact.

It's apparently OS/Java specific as far as I can tell and therefore independent of FRP version 4.03.03.

Here's how I wasted my time:

First I fired up my wife's relatively new MacBook with MacOS Big Sur (running OS v 11.1, like my MacBook Air) and Java version 8 update 271 installed and could reproduce the Summary View/Detailed View tab readability artifact.

Next, I hauled out an old MacBook Pro running MacOS Lion (OS 10.7.5) and installed the only version of Java that would run on it (Java Se Runtime Environment version 1.6.0_65).

Finally I downloaded the latest version of FRP (4.03.03) and ran the FRP.jar file in the manual install folder and voila the tab artifact was gone.

The attached screen shot shows the clearer, that is, artifact-free tabs from the oldest laptop.

Thanks again for your comment on the tabs.

I'll be interested what anyone else running this version of Java but an earlier MacOS sees for the Summary View/Detailed View tabs.

I'm interested.... but not enough to downgrade my OS to find out.

Red Head

Thanks for posting this extra info and confirmation that this is a Java version/MacOs version thing. Hopefully an update to Java or MacOs will fix this.

I'm encouraged that the built-in Java Control Panel is also experiencing this problem. I think that makes it much more likely it'll get fixed eventually.

To their credit, I'm basically a Java nobody and over the years I have reported two bugs and both were fixed within a release cycle.

Apparently Java version 1.8.0_321 fixed the cosmetic FRP button problem.

I guess that's Java version 8 update 321 for the MacOS.

But then again, I have upgraded my Mac OS too.
Now Monterey version 12.2.1, so there is that....
That was Jim's take.

Hurray.

Red Head