Smart Crash Reports
I’ve been following the development of Smart Crash Reports for the past few weeks and I think it is really great. It’s out of beta now, so there’s no reason not to start using it now.
If you haven’t seen or heard about it yet, basically it allows reports generated by Apple’s crash reporter to be sent to the original developer and not just Apple. This information is very valuable to developers, and the fact that Apple was collecting reports about our apps and not sharing them with us has always been a bit irritating. Especially when users think Apple is passing the reports on to us (they aren’t). The big question is: why the heck didn’t Apple do this a long time ago? There is no excuse for us having to wait for a third party to do what Apple should have done in the first place.
Well, on the bright side, now we have a way that we can get more reports about crashes from our users which, we hope, will help us improve the overall quality of our applications. As a result, I intend to make sure that this feature is enabled in all the apps I maintain (both from illumineX and Freshly Squeezed Software. As I complete new releases of each product, they will add this new feature.