Constant freezing/hanging in MATLAB 2019b on macOS with PIVLab 2.36+

[Daniel Cohen]

Hi everyone!

Longtime listener, second-time caller here. We reported a bug a year or so ago where we would get the spinning pinwheel whenever we did just about anything with PIVlab on a Mac. This bug happens with anything from 2.36 onward and we're not sure how to fix it. I've got 40 students trying to learn PIVLab and most of them have macs and I'm not sure what to do about it. Any ideas for advice? 

THank you!

Prof. Daniel Cohen

Princeton University

[William Thielicke]

Dear Daniel,

I would really like to help here, but without access to a Mac, there is nothing that I can directly do. If you say it happens when you do "about anthing": Are there situations were it doesn't happen? When does it hapen for the first time? My first wild guess is that it might be the image resize function of the GUI. Maybe try to disable it by opening PIVlab_GUI.m, and commenting everything out in the function

function MainWindow_ResizeFcn(hObject, ~)

PIVlab won't 100% work like this, but it maybe helps to track the cause.

Another approach would be to exactly define the first release that doesn't work anymore, and the last relase that worked. I can then check the differences.

Another approach would be to give me remote access to a Mac with Matlab (if that is even possible on Mac systems).

You might also try Matlab online, a browser based version of Matlab that also works with PIVlab (at least this was the case the last time I tried it when I still had an active Matlab Maintenance subscription).

[Daniel Cohen]

Hey, thanks for the reply! Sorry I didn't see the notification earlier. 

Running it in MATLAB online is a pretty good idea from a teaching perspective because then I could ensure that students would have a standardized experience; might need to try that out! 

I'll also test out blocking resizing to see if that makes a difference. 

I'm actually totally up for you remotely connecting to the mac to test things out if you have the time for something like that.

We often see the problem in basic things like clicking various menu buttons, or trying to type a number into a field box, like changing the box-size for FFT PIV parameters. 

Thanks for the advice!