Betalogue

I’ve already experienced my first Mailsmith application crash when trying to open a Mailbox Information window. The next time I restarted Mailsmith, I was greeted with a warning telling me that Mailsmith had crashed or been force-quit, and indicating that the possible culprits are the “Application Enhancers” that Mailsmith has detected I have installed.

I do have Application Enhancers installed — but this is the first time I get a software program that specifically identifies them as the potential culprit and recommends that I disable my enhancers.

I am not sure I like this so much. On the one hand, I can understand that Bare Bones does not want to take the blame for application instability brought on by third-party utilities that hack your Mac OS X system. On the other hand, these enhancers are ubiquitous and many of them perform very useful functions that a lot of advanced Mac users appreciate. So is Bare Bones telling us we must give up on all our goodies in the name of system stability? Is no one at Bare Bones using any of these goodies themselves?

Surely we can find a middle ground here. The trouble I see is that this policy effectively discourages many users from submitting what might be perfectly legitimate bug reports. Every time I experience a crash in Mailsmith, I am not about to disable my enhancers, log out, log back in and try to reproduce the circumstances that led to the crash! Some of the crashes might be caused by an enhancer, but some others might not be, and because of this policy I won’t be able to report them.

Can’t we all try to get along?

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.