Betalogue

Last week I wrote about an incompatibility introduced by the OS X 10.7.4 update with the French dictionary application Le Grand Robert.

I have since received a couple of e-mail responses from the developer, indicating that they blame the problem on Apple and on version 5.1.7 of Safari more specifically, rather than the OS X 10.7.4 update. Since both updates were released on the same day, it might help explain the confusion. (It also appears to confirm that, while Grand Robert is a stand-alone application, it apparently relies on Safari’s underlying technology, which makes it particularly vulnerable, especially if, as I have long suspected — because of a history of other rendering bugs —, the markup used in Grand Robert is not quite up to snuff.)

Now the Grand Robert developer has also posted a short tech note (in French) about the issue, indicating that the bug affects several of their products and that a patch should be released “soon.”

When you look at the tech note’s URL (which is not even part of the lerobert.com web site), the fact that they spelled “SAFARI” in all caps and also wrote “5.1..7” instead of “5.1.7”, it really does not reflect well on the developer. In addition, it should be noted that the Grand Robert application has no built-in software update mechanism (it does not even have a link to the developer’s web site) and that users are just expected to find that tech note and keep an eye on it until a link to a patch appears.

The Grand Robert application is not a cheap product and one would really expect better service and better software. But unfortunately that is all we are getting, and we just have to put up with it.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.