Projects - rebuild graphics apps for MacOS 11 Big Sur

[Charlie Fenton]

Mac OS 11 Big Sur, soon to be released to the public, introduces a significant bug to existing BOINC project graphics apps: when a user clicks on the Manager's "Show graphics" button, the graphics app's close button is disabled.

This leaves users with no immediately obvious way to dismiss the graphics application, which may be quite distressing to them.

I have updated the BOINC graphics library code to fix this (i.e., enable the close button again.) I strongly recommend that you rebuild your graphics apps as soon as possible with the latest version of libboinc_graphics2.a.

You can build the current library from the source files in either the GIT master repository, client_release/7/7.16 branch, or client_release/7/7.16/7.16.9 tag. For your convenience, I have also posted a built copy of the library at <https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/libboinc_graphics2_mac_7_16_9.zip>.

Please note also that 32-bit apps will not run on OS 10.15 Catalina or later.

There are a couple of workarounds available to users for the disabled close button:
[1] Control-click on the graphic app's Dock icon and select "quit."
[2] In the upcoming BOINC version 7.16.10 and later, the "Show graphics" button now changes to "Stop graphics" while the graphics app is running, providing a convenient way to close it.

Cheers,
--Charlie