I’m receiving occasional reports of PopClip freezing up when activating the Search action, and when using certain PopClip extensions. This affects version 2019.9 and 2019.9.1.

User review, one star: Version 2019.9 very unstable, Sep 25, 2019. Runed smoothly for years although it should get some enhancemences. But the new version 2019.9 is very, very unstable. It will freeze by each copy and magnifying glass action ... Don't know why this wasn't detected before it was published. Very annoying
One star.

Thanks to a customer who emailed me at support@pilotmoon.com and assisted with debugging, I am making progress with diagnosing the problem.1 I will continue to work on a fix, and I will update this blog post with more information.

Update, 29 Sep 2019: Another customer reported that deleting and reinstalling PopClip made the problem go away.

Update, 31 Oct 2019: The bug seems to be because PopClip is waiting for macOS to ask permission to automate the target. But macOS is not actually showing the permission request dialog. For the fix, I have attempted to mitigate this by calling the permission request on a background thread, to avoid locking up the app, and adding a timeout to abort waiting for permission if none is granted in a reasonable time. The fix is now in the latest beta version PopClip 2019.10.

Here is a video showing the problem, thanks to my helpful customer (posted with permission):

  1. For anyone interested, it’s AEDeterminePermissionToAutomateTarget() locking up. ↩