I'm encountering a frustrating customer support issue. My apps are all 64-bit, and make heavy use of command-line stuff on OS X, including osascript and afplay. On Snow Leopard, I get frequent crash reports from users, and the culprit is invariably some third-party installation (osax and audio plugins are the most common) that is 32-bit only and isn't compatible with 64-bit. (i.e. a 32-bit-only osax causes AppleScript to barf on Snow Leopard because it's looking for 64-bit dylibs as well).
I have the technical solutions for these all worked out and documented on my blog, in user forums, and in e-mails I send to users after seeing crash reports from them: update the osax and other conflicting files, move them out of the way if you run my app, etc. Still, I keep getting crash reports. I'm worried that my apps may get a reputation for being buggy and crash-prone even though they play by the rules (all my stuff is fully 64-32 bit compatible), and the crashes aren't my fault. I'm pretty certain I've lost some sales over this because people can't update certain things, or feel they shouldn't have to. Apart from documenting all known issues and educating users about these issues and advising them on how to update the stuff on their system that is causing conflicts, is there anything else I can do? How have others addressed these kinds of issues? (Redesigning my apps isn't really an option because the osascript and other stuff are integrated at a deep level, and more importantly, they work just fine if the user's environment is correctly configured.) Thanks, Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com
