I leave it to other bloggers to fill in the gaps of my education. Oh – and I’m sounding high and mighty right now, so before I get too carried away, let me just say that I too need to be educated on a great many things, but making sense of crash logs is not particularly high on that list. I imagine the hours wasted speculating about what the crash log means, and can’t help but think if they knew how to analyze it, they could have the bug solved (in many cases) in moments. Sometimes I find that the developer in question simply needs to be educated about the tools at his or her disposal. While I expect a response like “great, I see what the bug is, and I’ll get this fixed,” I often get responses more like “sigh, I’ve seen this a few times but have no idea what’s going on!” In my own experience of reporting bugs to other developers, I have found frequently that my crash log is considered more as a statistic than as a specimen. Which is why it boggles the mind to think that some developers see these crash logs as relatively useless. This artifact not only proves that a crashing bug exists, but usually includes highly detailed information about where and how the crash has happened. Occasionally, when a user is sophisticated enough to understand the value of the crash log and, instead of choosing to send it to Apple, copies and pastes it into an email to you, you should be overjoyed! Finally! A crash has been captured in the wild and delivered to you for easy inspection. Which is why crash logs are so important. Above all other “nuisances,” this is the one that is absolutely unacceptable. If there’s one behavior of your application that you should focus on eliminating, it’s the behavior of crashing. In the middle of a possibly important user task, the application comes screeching to a halt and disappears, leaving the user with nothing more than a cryptic message from the operating system, along with an offer to send the crash log off to Apple. Luckily for our users, 99% of those crashes happen on our own development machines, and we get the opportunity to fix them before shipping them off to our unsuspecting computers.īut every once in a while even the most polished and refined software exhibits that nastiest of malfunctions: the crashing bug. Developers who write code inevitably write code that crashes.
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