Odd Retrospect System Preferences icon in Catalina

[prl]

I've recently got a new MacBook Pro and I've gone form MacOS 10.11.x on my old MacBook (mid-2011) to Catalina 10.15.3. I was already running Retrospect 16.6.0 before I upgraded.

Retrospect was transferred onto the new Mac using Migration Assistant.

But I have a minor, possibly only cosmetic problem.

In System Preferences main panel, the Retrospect icon is overlaid with some other strange icon (or perhaps the icon has been munged). I think it's being overlaid, because when I first open System Preference, the correct icon seems to be there initially, but then get overwritten. The icon in System Preferences>Retrospect is OK. The overlay isn't the "you can't run this" overlay that gets put on top of 32-bit apps in Catalina.

This is the icon:

I've re-installed Retrospect in case the icon was a glitch in Migration Assistant, but it didn't change the icon.

[DavidHertzberg]

prl and anybody else,

I'm going to hazard a guess that Catalina has some difficulty displaying the Retrospect icon, possibly because—as the icon is used in the Menu Bar of a Mac running the Retrospect Client—it has the capability of changing the way the facets are displayed at an interval of about one second to show the Retrospect Client is doing work.  Maybe the Dantz-written facet-changing code is 32-bit, and therefore doesn't work under Catalina—but messes up the way the icon is displayed in the System Preferences main panel.

My impression from looking backward at a few of prl's posts is that he/she is only backing up a single Mac, and therefore is running the Retrospect Engine (and probably Console) directly on it—without using the Retrospect Client.  Would someone who uses the Retrospect Mac Client on a machine running under Catalina please check if it still has the capability of changing the way the facets are displayed at an interval of about one second to show the Retrospect Client is doing work?  Please do so and post the answer back in this thread.  (None of my Macs are running under Catalina.)

Once we get that post—and maybe if we don't, prl, here is why and how to submit a Support Case for a bug.

[prl]

I use Retrospect Client. I back up a second Mac to a Retrospect server on my Mac, and I run Console on the same Mac as the server. But unfortunately for any testing, the other Mac doesn't (and can't) run Catalina. It's a Early 2011 MB Pro.

But anyway, I'd have thought that the problem with the icon in System Preferences would show up whether Client was in use or not, even if it is the same icon as the one used in a Client's menu bar.

My preferred personal pronoun is "he"

[DavidHertzberg]

prl,

Your OP observation is that "the correct icon seems to be there initially, but then get overwritten", and the overlaying icon in your OP screenshot looks to my eyes like a distorted version of the correct icon.  Therefore I'm speculating that code connected to the icon generates some reaction by Catalina, and that the reaction is what's distorting it.  The fact that the changing-facet code isn't executing in System Preferences wouldn't necessarily deter Catalina's reaction, but my speculation implies that the same distortion would occur when the icon is displayed in the Menu Bar of a "client" machine running under Catalina.  That's why I asked someone to check this; evidently that someone can't be either you or me.

If your preferred personal pronoun is "he", set the Gender item in your Forums Profile to Male—as I did years ago.  I know a lot of administrators haven't done that, which is why I always begin my posts with the "handle" of the administrator I'm responding to—whom I then can usually refer to as second-person "you" without my junior-high-school English teachers rolling over in their graves.  If I have to use third-person, I check the administrator's Profile.

[prl]

David, thanks for the clarification. I've set my gender in my profile.

[DavidHertzberg]

On 2/2/2020 at 9:22 PM, prl said:

David, thanks for the clarification. I've set my gender in my profile.

prl and any other non-ancient Forums members,

There appears to be some kind of bug in the Forums software regarding the display of Profiles.  Members who did not disable the Recent Visitors "block" display, such as me and Don Lee and kolohe280 (who didn't put anything in his/her Profile but didn't disable its display) and Lindsay Robertson, have their Profile information displayed.  Members who did disable the Recent Visitors "block" display, such as prl, don't have their Profile information displayed.  Thus I can't see prl's Gender.

I'll file a Support Case for the bug.

[Nigel Smith]

No help, but can confirm -- upgrading clean Mojave/RS16 install to Catalina gave me the same icon problem.

Icon 3 in /Library/Application\ Support/Retrospect/RetrospectEngine.app/Contents/Resources/app.icns is:

...although, stupidly, I forgot to check before I upgraded the OS.

Edit to add:

Interestingly(?) a fresh-install Catalina client has the correct icons in System Prefs->Privacy->Full Disk Access, but the banjaxed ones in System Prefs->Privacy->Files and Folders where the icons appear to be smaller.

[DavidHertzberg]

Yesterday morning I mistakenly quoted prl's OP as an Additional Note to the Support Case I filed reporting the Forums bug described in my 4 February post in this thread.  I got back the following from the head of Retrospect Tech Support:

Quote

Agent Response: 

>I've re-installed Retrospect in case the icon was a glitch in Migration Assistant, but it didn't change the 
icon.

Reinstalling would replace the icon files.  If the icon data was corrupted, I would have expected a reinstall 
to correct that issue.  It is sounding like something within the operation system is not correctly loading 
this data and preventing it from displaying in a normal way.  It could be a pure cosmetic issue if everything 
else is functioning as expected. 

In my Additional Note this afternoon apologizing for not having included the link (which I had reserved space for, but forgot to paste in) to prl's OP, I also quoted the first paragraph of this 2 February post by me—because IMHO it's a worthy guess🤓.  I also quoted the post Nigel Smith made yesterday—this time including a link to it.

Nigel Smith, I think you should copy your post yesterday as a Support Case.  IMHO your confirmation is the most-thoroughly-documented example  of the problem by an administrator who has actually experienced it—unlike me.

[Nigel Smith]

17 hours ago, DavidHertzberg said:

Nigel Smith, I think you should copy your post yesterday as a Support Case.

Done.

If anyone wants to see the problem, zipped screen recording attached. If you step frame-by-frame from just past halfway you'll see the switch. 

Screen Recording 2020-02-24 at 12.59.02.zip

[DavidHertzberg]

Nigel Smith,

I never do anything with movies, so I downloaded and unzipped your .mov attachment and opened it with the default Quick Time Player 10.4.  That has no stepping capability, so I downloaded the latest version of VLC—which also has no stepping capability.  Either app shows a Retrospect icon in its uglified version, then briefly switches to what would guess is a Quick Time icon, then briefly switches to the Retrospect icon in its old non-uglified version, and finally switches back to the Retrospect icon in its uglified version.

[Nigel Smith]

On 2/26/2020 at 4:51 PM, DavidHertzberg said:

I never do anything with movies, so I downloaded and unzipped your .mov attachment and opened it with the default Quick Time Player 10.4. That has no stepping capability...

Stop the movie, then right-arrow to forward frame-by-frame, left-arrow for backwards -- works for QT Player anyway, don't know about VLC.