PPC And 10.4 Tiger Debugging

/ 10 January 2008

In these last two evenings I’ve managed to pinpoint and catch two significant bugs in my AlexPersonalProject application component of my personal project. The PPC one was caught last night and turned out to be the Objective-C Garbage Collection in the compiler settings (needs to be unsupported). The 10.4 Tiger bug was quite a bit more complex a bug to pinpoint. In the crashlog on the iBook G4 (my old mac) that I’m using to test the PPC/ 10.4 platform it mentioned the NIB.

So, this evening I added the same NIB (interface document) into a new project and built that. When tested it ran perfectly on the iBook G4. So, I started building the whole application in this project (trashing the old one, save the copy stored in Time Machine) and got all the way to where I was connecting the interface to the Objective-C. At that step it started crashing again on the iBook G4. I started un-connecting the interface and Objective-C and I caught the issue as being the interactive interface comparison examples.

So, at the end of these two days of debugging the compatibility of AlexPersonalProject to the main configuration that it will be running on I’ve gotten (and backed up on the iBook G4) a version that works and have a good idea of what was causing the crash. This very experience is in essence the heart of application development.

I also have spent parts of the last two weeks enhancing the documentation that will be accompanying AlexPersonalProject. Enjoy, Alex.

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