Compatibility warning: macOS Mojave 10.14.4 cannot display some OmniOutliner and OmniPlan documents [Fixed in 10.14.5]

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Compatibility warning: macOS Mojave 10.14.4 cannot display some OmniOutliner and OmniPlan documents

Good afternoon, readers! It’s incredibly rare for us to have to do this, but I need to let our Mac customers know that the 10.14.4 version of Mojave which shipped a few weeks ago (on March 25, 2019) has a drawing bug which makes windows with large CoreAnimation layers fail to draw. In particular, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan customers have been telling us that since upgrading to 10.14.4, they will open some documents and end up seeing… nothing. Perhaps some empty borders around the window. (Or if another window is dragged over the space where that window should be drawing, they’ll see a trail of its old pixels.) This is most likely to affect customers who are using older hardware, but it also affects large documents on newer hardware.

We’re working with Apple to get this resolved as soon as possible, but for now it appears there’s nothing we can do to resolve this on our own. We’ll provide an update as soon as a fix is available. In the meantime, I’m afraid we need to recommend that any OmniOutliner or OmniPlan customers with older hardware or large documents hold off on updating to 10.14.4. (Earlier versions of Mojave are fine.)

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UPDATE (April 14, 2019): Good news! We’ve been working with Apple and tested a fix that will be in the next Software Update to macOS Mojave. (I don’t know the timeframe for that update shipping to the general public, but I’m glad this fix is on its way!)

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UPDATE: This issue was fixed in the 10.14.5 update which shipped on May 13! Here’s the full status update from our blog:


In a previous blog post, we noted a compatibility issue: in macOS 10.14.4, some OmniOutliner and OmniPlan documents (large documents, generally) wouldn’t display.

We’re very happy to report that our testers have verified that macOS 10.14.5, released today, fixes that bug.

If you’re running 10.14.4, we strongly recommend that you upgrade.

Side note: Apple’s release notes actually say “Fixes an issue that prevented certain very large OmniOutliner and OmniPlan documents from rendering properly.” Their release notes don’t usually mention specific third-party apps! But this time it made sense.

Technical note, for the curious: OmniOutliner and OmniPlan use Core Animation layers, and the bug appears to have been related to very large numbers of layers. Now fixed!

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