Crash Reporter (OS X)
| Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 2.1 |
| Operating system | Mac OS X |
| Type | Crash Reporter |
| Website | http://www.apple.com/ |
Crash Reporter is the standard crash reporter in Mac OS X.[1] Crash Reporter can send the crash logs to Apple Inc. for their engineers to review.
Crash Reporter has three modes of operations:
- Basic — The default mode. Only application crashes are reported, and the dialog does not contain any debugging information.
- Developer — In addition to application crashes, crashes are also displayed for background and system processes.
- Server — The default for OS X Server systems. No crash reports are shown to the user (though they are still logged).
- None — Disables the dialog prompt. Crash reports are neither displayed nor logged.
The developer tool CrashReporterPrefs can be used to change modes, as can using the terminal command defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType [basic|developer|server].
In basic mode, if Crash Reporter notices an application has crashed twice in succession, it will offer to rename the application's preference file and try again (corrupted preference files being a common cause of crashes).
When reporting a crash, the top text field of the window has the crash log, while the bottom field is for user comments. Users may also copy and paste the log into their e-mail client to send to a third-party application developer for the developer to use.
Alternatives
Since Apple's Crash Reporter only submits crash reports to Apple, there are some third party alternatives which allow users to also submit crash reports to the developers of the crashing software. Red Sweater Software's summer 2009 blog post Crash Reporter Roundup compares various crash reporters; current ones include:
- Unsanity developed an Input Manager called Smart Crash Reports, that patches Apple software to include a "submit to developer" button within Crash Reporter.[2] Smart Crash Reports only works with Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.
- Uli Kusterer wrote UKCrashReporter,[3] which can send the output of Apple's Crash Reporter to a developer the next time the application is started.
- CMCrashReporter[4] is a small opensource framework, which can send the crashlog to the developer (via HTTP POST) and let the user enter optional details.
- ILCrashReporter-NG, a fork of Infinite Loop's ILCrashReporter (which was for Mac OS X 10.2-10.5); current OS support unknown
- plcrashreporter Plausible CrashReporter provides an in-process crash reporting framework for use on both the iPhone and Mac OS X
- Google Breakpad, an open-source multi-platform crash reporting system
