Smart Crash Reports
Posted September 6th, 2005 @ 08:21am by Erik J. Barzeski
Leave it to Unsanity. Earlier this year I mentioned in a QotD that I was "still hoping Apple provides a way for an application to provide contact information for the developer so that we, not frickin' Apple, get the crash reports."
Now we can, with Smart Crash Reports. Of course, SCR is not ideal as users have to go install it - it's clearly not an Apple-provided solution - but for beta tests, it should ease the transition, and some users who are, well, the geekier users will likely have it installed. I know I've hesitated to send in crash reports because I had to copy the crash data, go to the developer's site, find their email address, and send them the info. SCR will not help everyone, but it will help the lazy geek.
Update: Links fixed. Thanks Jesper.
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Posted 06 Sep 2005 at 9:04am #
You don't link to Unsanity's solution but only to your previous QOTD (which, I'm guessing, you were going to link in the first paragraph). For the record, and in the meantime, here's Unsanity's solution.
Posted 06 Sep 2005 at 9:54am #
I don't know how they do it, but Adium X has their own solution to this which works quite seamlessly. When Adium crashes, the Apple crash reporter is suppressed and their own crash reporter application is started which enables sending the crash report directly to the Adium X folks.
Posted 06 Sep 2005 at 10:07am #
Adium X hooks up certain signal handlers. So if things go south, certain functions will try their best to launch the Crash Reporter app that's inside of Adium's resources. OmniWeb 5 (and, I suppose, other OmniApps) also do something like this.
It's really quite clever.
Posted 06 Sep 2005 at 6:20pm #
Shoudn't it be something that every developer should include in their product then? I suppose some crash logs are more useful than others.