fixing SoapUI on OSX by turning off the browser

The SoapUI 4.* gui has been broken in several areas for me on OSX Snow Leopard (and from other posts on the forums, also for Lion users). Mostly, when clicking on any dialogs in the right-hand panel of the app, instead of the dialog being activated it disappears. It seems the "browser" component, which seems to be what shows the big SoapUI Pro ads and the like on startup, decides to grab the focus of the whole panel, and clicking anywhere just clicks on the browser.

I found posts elsewhere for people with similar problems on Linux, that suggest adding a new Java option to soapui.sh:
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dsoapui.jxbrowser.disable=true"

However, on OSX this doesn't seem to work (someone suggested it works if you run soapui.sh from a command line, I haven't tried that). But you *can* change the java opts for the application, as follows:

• Browse to the SoapUI application in Finder (on my machine it's in /Applications/SmartBear/soapUI-4.5.0.1-SNAPSHOT.app)


• Right-click the app and select "show package contents"


• a new Finder window should open up showing the app contents - there should be a file called "info.plist" in the root of the app


• double-click on info.plist (or right-click and select "Open") - it should open in xcode, if not you might need to have xcode or an equivalent editor installed


• Scroll down to the "Java" entry, click the arrow next to it to open it


• Open the "Properties" entry under "Java"


• Click the "+" button next to "Properties" to add a new property


• Add a new entry named "soapui.jxbrowser.disable", type "String", value "true"


• Save the updated info.plist file

Now when you run soapUI you get no annoying browser, and gui elements, while still ugly, mostly work. I hope this helps someone else, it has been very frustrating for me...