When an application crashes in Mac OS X, there’s a dialog box that appears to inform you of it. It mentions that no other applications are affected. This irritates me every time I see it. Honestly, I thought they’d remove this before 10.0 went final. It meant for a nice “Oooh, ahhh!” moment at WWDC in 1998 or so, given a crowd of Mac OS developers, but has been meaningless ever since. This is expected behavior in a modern operating system!
(Hi-lighting added.)
This is from Xcode’s Interface Builder. I’ve never seen a more polite assertion failure. It even asks if it’s okay to crash. You don’t see that very often. And keep in mind this is for a tool used by software developers. What’s our excuse when developing software for regular users?
And yes, I’m going to choose Crash. They asked politely enough.
My relationship with Microsoft Word for the Mac has always been a love/hate one. I can’t really describe why I love it - there’s just something about the way the main document window behaves that fills me with word processing joy, as stupid as that sounds (once the keyboard shortcuts have been de-Microsoft-ized, at least). However, the rest of the product seriously sucks.
We have multiple testing checklists that need to be followed, and items checked off, every build we’re seriously testing. I could go into a whole rant about these lists, but I think everyone who’s seen them (and especially had to use them) would agree with me on it. At the moment it has to be done, and that’s it.
Microsoft Word for Windows handles these with ease. It’s only when they’re brought over to my PowerBook that they start to cause problems.
The spinning wait cursor abound as I try to work with this document. A lot of it is caused by the documents being in Page Layout mode. Switching to Normal mode fixes this, but I hate Normal mode. It confuses me why I’d have to use it, considering how responsive Word for Windows is, even in Page Layout mode. Still, I can put up with this.
More significant, though: I fill this form out by repeating the formatting change that checks an item on the list. Sometimes I apply it to the wrong line, and then it’s time to Undo. Undo has about a 70% chance of crashing Word. Not every use of Undo, but just undoing this particular formatting change.
Seriously.
How did this ship? And how did Microsoft manage to release roughly ten minor updates to Microsoft Word without ever fixing this? Does the Mac team at Microsoft use Word on Windows for all their large documents? Are the Mac team at Microsoft perfect people who never use Undo? That’s a trick question. If they were perfect, Undo wouldn’t crash. (Not that I expect perfection. I can’t attain that myself, after all.)
This seriously, seriously sucks. It’s cost me serious amounts of time. What good is software that crashes all the time? Why do people - including me - keep paying for products like this?
“Programs that crash have been proven to be less useful than those that don’t.” — Apple Technote #117