OSX 10.9 Mavericks Will Not Run Pronterface in the Background

This is a problem with a solution in case some one else has the same issue. I just upgraded my iMac to OSX 10.9 and everytime Pronterface went into the background (via a screen saver or another app full screen) it would stop! It turns out that Mavericks has a feature called "App Nap" which is intended to save battery on a laptop. Why this is a default and why on my computer which is not a laptop and why even if it was the fact that I am plugged into the wall did not get recognized! In any case you can turn this feature off by finding the application, opening info on it, and checking the box to disable it.

Thanks for this tip! It was giving me grief in the 10.10 Yosemite developer's preview as well.....

Hmm. So email clients put into the background no longer receive email? That's an interesting "feature"

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

If an application makes the correct API call(s), I'm guessing that it doesn't get put to sleep. I'm also guessing that Pronterface is running in some sort of backwards compatibility mode, which is why the silly checkbox is there to handle apps that don't make the call(s) properly.

Every time that I start Pronterface on the pre-beta OSX 10.10, it opens up the screen with the custom buttons hidden and also neglects to add itself to the top menu bar until I change screens and go back. Unfortunately, the checkbox didn't fix these problems.....

One of the most important achievements of Unixy operating systems is that background applications do not go to sleep. Background apps sleeping is essentially what we had with early Mac OSs, like System 5 and before.

Not sure what Apple wants to achieve here. A countermeasure for lazy programmers which don't care to implement proper idling? Usually the application framework (Cocoa) takes care of that.

How do command line tools work? Does this behaviour change when something is started from the command line?

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

I don't personally have any hands-on with programming under OSX. Apple has been acting OCD regarding battery life on all of their platforms, and IIRC one of the features of Mavericks was saving power in the Safari web browser. Palm's deployment of WebKit actually disabled animated GIF images on web pages to save battery power, and I can only imagine that Apple takes several steps further. Looking at their decisions from the outside, it also appears that the iOS group is dictating OSX features, and iOS's multitasking was more like Borland and Norton products under MS-DOS than the Unix it was built on top of.....

I knew it was coming a long time ago but Apple is turning the computers into an iPhone (not literally of course) this is a marketing ploy, they want the throngs of iOS users to see the Mac as the same so if you are already comfortable using an iPhone you will likely buy a Mac as it works just like one.

On a more important note... Who is still using Proterface??? Do yourself a favor and install Repetier Host. It's way better than Pronterface and very much more "Mac" like. And it's free of course.

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tmorris9
On a more important note... Who is still using Proterface??? Do yourself a favor and install Repetier Host. It's way better than Pronterface and very much more "Mac" like. And it's free of course.

Ever since Repetier Host (RH) went closed-source, I have been trying to move away from that ecosystem. (The Mac version of RH may still be open-source, since it hasn't been maintained in a while.) It has been a painful transition from the Windows version of RH to anything else, since realtime position reporting doesn't seem to be a feature of most of the other options. I only installed Pronterface for tuning my new Delta, since the process involves creating a slew of custom buttons and RH/win's macro feature that provides a similar function isn't as clean as Pronterface's buttons. My new controller is an Azteeg X5 Mini running Smoothieware, and my interactions with Pronterface are just typing "@play /sd/filename.gcode" to start a print from SD card and then disconnecting from the printer.

My next host software may be MatterControl. It does almost everything that RH does, and is being actively maintained.....

I did not realize RH had gone closed source. I have not upgraded it or anything since I installed it almost 3 years ago.