HDCrashReporter - Cocoa crash reporter class

Software quality and stability is important! It is in fact so important that without it nobody would even touch the software you created. It is like the most important feature of an application. That is way most updates of any application most likely start with the phrase "Enhances software performance and overall stability". That is my deepest opinion and that's why every software feature I implement needs to pass at least a couple of stability tests before I even consider giving it to beta testers.

Software stability is a generic term for a lot of software attributes. Among them is the application's resistance to crashes. While it is not possible to make a software completely crash resistant, you should always try to minimize there occurances.

That is why I considered integrating a crash reporter class into Snowtape. In my research I found a lot of possible free and open-source Cocoa classes for everybody to use. Among them is the HDCrashReporter by Humble Daisy, Inc. What I like about it is it's simplicity and it's minimal integration efforts. It is really only one class and there is no wacky deamon or anything else that intervene with Apple's crash reporter work flow. It simply looks for a new crash report and lets the user send it via Mail.

However I came across some problems that prevented me from using it out of the box. E.g. it seems that it is not Leopard compatible. In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Apple changed a lot of stuff concerning the crash reports and console logs. Second thing is that it was using the NSMailDelivery class which got deprecated in Leopard. Instead Apple wants the developers to use the new Scripting Bridge framework to send emails using Mail.

I fixed all these problems along with a couple of bug fixes. HDCrashReporter is now using ScriptingBridge to talk to Mail and it is fully Leopard compatible. I am making the source code of my version public for everyone to use. Please send back any bug report.

Download: HDCrashReporter.zip (76k)

July 6th, 2009

Most Recent Blog Posts

08/08/2010 - Last.fm with Snowtape Phone 1.3
07/30/2010 - Announcing Jubilee 1.1
07/29/2010 - Optimizing Snowtape for Retina Display
07/23/2010 - Jubilee 1.0.1 - 50% off
06/30/2010 - Multitasking with Snowtape 1.2 for iPhone
06/01/2010 - Winners of a Jubilee Promo Code