Xblaze

The amount of reviews Xblaze gets on the App Store that say nothing more than “it crashes! 1 star!” is depressing.

By doing this you’re not helping anyone. Firstly, you’re deterring new users from giving the app a try. Secondly you’re not giving me anything to work with to fix the crashes.

How can I be expected to fix a crash I never see? It’s not as if I don’t test Xblaze. I use it daily and I put it through rigorous tests before I release it to the App Store. If I see a crash I fix it before releasing – so any crashes that do get through are not common and will require a detailed crash report and explanation of how the crash occurred or what you might have done to cause it.

iPhones, iPods and iTunes can help us all out here. When an app crashes, a crash log is generated. That crash log contains extremely important information about when, how and why the crash happened. The crash report is the single most important resource I can use when trying to fix a crash.

When you plug your iPhone or iPod into iTunes and sync it, you should be told that your device contains Diagnostic Data or Crash Report Data or something to that affect and will ask you if you’d like to send it to Apple. Say YES. If you say no to this question – your crashes will likely never get fixed and you’ll continue to be frustrated when using the application.

If you don’t see the message then one of two things is possible: The less likely reason is that Xblaze isn’t crashing. The more likely reason is that for whatever reason you’ve previously answered NO to sending crash reports to Apple and have told iTunes not to ask you again.

To fix this, you can right click on your iPhone or iPod in the iTunes sidebar and select “Reset Warnings”. Now when you sync if your iPod contains crash reports, you will be asked if you want to send them. Again – please say YES.

Finally, if you don’t sync your device, or haven’t updated it’s OS (regardless of whether its jailbroken or not) I can’t help you. This is a two way relationship. I give you Xblaze, you give me feedback. OK?

If you don’t send me these crash reports I will never know why the app is crashing. Think about it…

Please read this post that I made previously:

Why Push Notifications Are Unlikely To Be Added

The long story short is:

• It is probably against Xfire’s Terms and Conditions
• I don’t have the resources to commit to a relay server, which includes:
  • Development time
  • Maintenance time
  • Development /maintenance costs
  • Hardware / hosting costs

For this reason I will not commit to push notifications unless a solution that overrides all above reasons appears.

I’m really sorry guys, but you’re going to have to bear with me. These last couple of months have been absolutely hectic for me and I’ve had no time to put towards Xblaze. I’m really sorry.

As my gift to you, I’m putting out a small pre-release of Xflame. An Alpha if you will… It’s not going to be rock solid, and it’ll likely be rather slow and un-optimised. But it gives you an idea of what’s going on behind the scenes and it also gives you a way to still use Xfire without having to hang back with Adium 1.2.7.

Now keep in mind that this is an ALPHA. If anything it’s not even that. There WILL be bugs. There WILL be annoyances. By downloading and using Xflame, you’re agreeing not to hold me liable for any damage it does to your computer or the data stored on it. You use Xflame at your own risk.

Also, what you will see and will be using is an old prototype of what Xflame was to become. Please remember that Xflame is still under the process of being re-written from the ground up to use a new Xfire Protocol Library. A lot of what you see WILL be different the next time you see Xflame. So please try not to complain too much about missing features or broken features – they will be coming sometime in the future.

Finally, and I think this is going to annoy some people…. Xflame requires OS X 10.5 Leopard. Since 68% of Xblaze visitors are using Leopard. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem, I hope. And those 28% of Tiger users and 2% of Panther users… get with the times
.

As always, the forum is available for help.

If you think you can handle all of that: Download Xflame-01.a.

One last thing, please DO NOT submit this to sites like Version Tracker, MacUpdate or anything else. If that happens, I will be forced to remove the download. You’ll only be shooting yourself in the foot.