Posted By Paul Kafasis on September 21st, 2005

Starting with Audio Hijack Pro 2.6, and expanding to the rest our products as they are updated, we will be supporting Unsanity’s Smart Crash Reports:

Smart Crash Reports (SCR) is an enhancement for the Apple's CrashReporter application introduced in Mac OS X 10.4. It allows 3rd party developers to register their own match specifiers, and if the crash log the user is about to submit contains the match specifier, the crash log will be sent to the developer as well as Apple.

Many people think Apple provides developers with the crash reports that they collect, which would be a logical thing to assume. But to date, only the largest of commercial developers (whose names might rhyme with Nairobi and Nicrosoft) are rumored to have any kind of access. Developers both large and small have asked Apple for some kind of mechanism for getting crashlogs out of the Crash Reporter, but response from Apple has always been a vague shrug.

Luckily Unsanity took some initiative, and come up with a wonderful solution to solve the problem: Just make CrashReporter.app send its reports to all interested parties.

To enable Smart Crash Reports, you can download an installer off of Unsanity’s website, or even easier, use the the installer that’s built into Audio Hijack Pro 2.6 (Audio Hijack Pro > Install Extras… > Smart Crash Reports).

Once Smart Crash Reports is installed, and a Smart Crash Report enabled application crashes (because of cosmic rays perhaps?), you’ll see something like this:

It’s the (sadly) familiar Crash Reporter, but now with the option to send the report to both the developer and Apple.

For fellow developers, we highly recommend SCR. Adding support for it really was as simple as adding the following 4 lines to Audio Hijack’s Info.plist file:

<key>SmartCrashReports_CompanyName</key>
<string>Rogue Amoeba</string>
<key>SmartCrashReports_URL</key>
<string>https://rogueamoeba.com/cgi-bin/crashReporter.cgi</string>

After that, Smart Crash Reports is intelligent enough to handle the rest.