Many bugs (or quirks) that exist in the Classic Helix interface have been addressed in OS X Helix. Most are quite arcane and a listing of them would be long and dull, and of interest to only a few people at most.

Helix no longer consumes 100% of all available CPU time.

Pressing a key command to execute a menu item should always highlight that menu briefly to provide feedback to the user. In Helix 4.5.3 this function was disabled in the case of the Enter command. The rationale was that when Enter is called repeatedly in a sequence, highlighting the menu is a distraction and reduces performance.

In Helix 6.1, pressing the Enter key properly highlights the menu when an Enter command is executed. When the Enter command is executed as part of a sequence, the menu is not highlighted.

When a view has a background color set, printing that view in Classic Helix would result in the background color printing over the entire printable area of the page, regardless of the actual size of the view. OS X Helix respects the trimmed view size, printing only what is required — and saving a lot of ink.

In Classic Helix an undefined picture field has a white background, regardless of the chosen background color. This is fixed in OS X Helix: the chosen background color is shown.

When an error is generated during the running of a sequence, there can sometimes be two error messages generated. For example, if a sequence tries to enter a record that cannot be entered because a validation check fails, there are two errors involved: the error because of the validation failure and the error because the record can not be entered.

Prior versions of Helix concatenated these two errors into a single entity, sometimes producing messages that did not make sense as presented. Helix 6.1 splits these messages onto separate lines, making it more apparent that two errors are involved.

A long-standing bug in Helix has been fixed: when an abacus containing a Form Time tile is used in a statistics or lookup tile, the form time was not being recalculated when the view was cleared. The form time was being calculated just once, when the view was opened, and only by closing and reopening the view would an updated form time value be acquired.

OS X Helix correctly recalculates abaci containing statistics and lookup tiles that reference a Form Time tile whenever the view is cleared.

Note: OS X Helix returns an undefined value when a Form Time tile is placed directly into the third hole (source value) of a lookup tile. This construction would be extremely rare — we can find no use whatsoever for such a construction — but if required, the workaround is to create a separate abacus containing just the Form Time tile, and putting that abacus into the third hole of the lookup tile.

In Classic Helix, the Tab Field command (available in sequences) is disabled unless an editable field already has focus. This is inconsistent when compared to literally pressing the Tab key on the keyboard. As far as we can tell, it has been this way ever since the Tab Field command was introduced.

Since the logical purpose of the Tab Field command is to mimic pressing the Tab key, we consider this a bug, and it is fixed in OS X Helix.