As many of you know, we love to build polished and reliable apps for the Mac. We spend a great deal of time working on the development, design and testing of each of our products: however, we also know that occasionally issues can pop up and users experience problems with our apps. Sometimes users will drop us an email letting us know that something isn't working however we also include a crash reporter in all our apps that allow users to optionally send us crash reports.
Like many people when submitting crash reports, I often wonder where the crash reports go. More often than not, they seem to go into the ether - maybe disappearing and reappearing in a poor developers inbox complete with poems, maybe just going into a big automated system never to be seen again.
At Realmac we've got a number of systems behind the scenes to help us manage and track crash reports. We've got the in-office info displays (which we'll be talking about soon) that show the number of crashes reported per product over the last 1, 7 and 30 days. We've also got the Realmac Crash Reporter that our developers use to view individual crash reports and look for trends in the crash logs to identify common issues. When you send in a crash log, this is where it'll end up and typically within the next working day or so we take a look at the logs to see what's going on. Whilst we look at every log that comes in, the nature of each crash determines what we do with the report.
Sometimes we'll simply ticket a crash log for our developers to look into on our bug tracker, and occasionally we send users who've reported a bug an email for some more details. Sometimes, however, we notice something that requires us to contact a large group of users. One such issue popped up recently, when we noticed a spike in the number of Socialite crashes reported. Looking at the crash logs we discovered that the sudden spike was due to a recent web plugin update (clue: it starts with "F" and ends in "lash" ) - in fact, over 90% of the crashes reported were due to this one plugin issue. Earlier this month the plugin in question was updated, and in our testing fixed the crash that affected almost all Socialite user. We decided to make the most of the our crash reporter by compiling a definitive list of those affected by the crash, and sending them a short email on how to fix the issue.
We know that people prefer to receive as little email as possible. However we happen to think that if you've included an email address with your crash report you probably won't mind us dropping you a note to let you know we're on the case! Over the last few months we've been emailing folks for details about their crashes - and plan to make the most of our crash reporter, contacting as many users as possible who report issues in the future!
