Crash Pro (v 2.12)

Review by Mike Featherstone

Updated 2/12/2004

 

Introduction

 

When a Palm OS PDA crashes, in my experience anyway, it can result in one of two very similar things. The first is a complete failure or lock-up requiring a so called ‘pin reset’ in order to get the PDA going again. The second is a fatal error causing a helpful little box to be displayed with a reset button that doesn’t work….requiring you to do a pin-reset in order to get the PDA going again. Either way, the reset pin comes into the scenario somewhere which normally involves a certain amount of annoying scrabbling about with the stylus and various inaccessible holes in the casing of the unit. Regardless of your type of PDA, performing a soft reset is an annoyance at best (and becomes a real pain when you have to do it every five minutes).

 

Fortunately, if you suffer from a particularly crash prone PDA or you are developing or testing PDA software, a number of utilities are available that are able to help you manage this problem. The most aptly named of these is probably Crash Pro from 79bmedia.

 

The Application

 

I’ve been using this software (and the cut down Freeware version - Crash), on my PDAs for a long time now – reviewing and Beta testing software has its pitfalls and frequent software crashes can be one of them. With Crash Pro installed, however, rather than having your system grind to an undignified halt when a crash is detected, failures are interrupted at the operating system interface and handled in such a way as to minimise the impact to you while maximising the information available on what caused the failure event in the first place. Crash Pro (and Crash) will provide notification that a crash has occurred and, more usefully, reset the unit after a pre-defined time delay to save all that fiddling around with the stylus.

 

Even if you’re not interested in knowing the cause of any problems and just want your unit back in operation after a failure without too much effort, this utility would be well worth obtaining.

 

As well as the serious stuff of handling system failures, some of the features offered by Crash Pro are actually just for fun. The ability to select a picture to display when your machine ‘falls over’ does absolutely nothing to prevent the problem but may, at least, give you something slightly entertaining to do while you curse the author of your latest piece of immature software. I have yet to find out how long the pictures remain entertaining for, but you can change them periodically or have a random selection displayed at each failure event. I’m naturally quite cynical about what I normally dismiss as ‘this sort of gimmick’, but I must confess that I’ve just visited the developer’s website and downloaded a number of additional images to use with my copy, so I shall remain silent on the matter!

 

To my mind, as an active Beta tester, and someone who just likes his software tools to work, the most useful feature of Crash Pro (and one of those that’s not available in Crash) is the fault logging facility. This holds a time-stamped record of the full message associated with any logged failure event as well as identifying the application responsible for raising the error. It also logs time-stamped soft resets. This, I find can be less helpful. A message telling me I performed a soft reset really adds nothing to the information I already have available and possible masks a more useful message that would otherwise have been retained in the log. This feeling has obviously been conveyed to 79bmedia because the latest version now comes with an option to manually purge historic ‘Soft Resets’ from your log leaving you more room to store messages that interest you. Soft resets are still logged, of course, so if that data is of interest, don’t purge it and it will still be available.

 

Why Use Crash Pro?

 

An important part of testing software, or reporting a bug in your favourite application to try and get it fixed, is the ability to clearly relay fault information to the developer. Only with sensible feedback does anyone stand a chance of finding a problem in software, no matter how large and obvious an issue it may seem to you. Having removed the need for you to mess about with the reset pin, Crash Pro also removes the need to grab pencil and paper and note down system addresses and failure messages if you feel so inclined. With the logging facility enabled, Crash Pro itself will attempt to store away the relevant data for you so that it will be available for recording and reporting following the restart. As the manual points out, it is only an attempt to store this data and one that is not necessarily always going to be successful. Any sort of ‘fiddling around’ in memory is a potentially risky operation when your system is in an unstable state following a software failure. That being said, however, since I’ve been using the software I’ve been engaged in a couple of major beta tests and quite a few reviews, but only during a specific HotSync issue I have has it actually failed to work as advertised (it didn't manage to reset my T3) and even then, the contents of the crash log was intact and available for inspection.

 

The number of failure events stored is configurable, as is the amount of time that the software will wait before commanding the unit to perform a reset. Personally, I use a relatively small time period and a relatively small log. With logging enabled, you don’t have to write anything down so why wait for a long time looking at an error message you can do nothing about. Similarly, if I’m testing something and actually need the failure data, I tend to access it immediately after the event so don’t need it hanging about in log memory for long periods of time. The point of making it configurable, though, is that if you have different needs to me, these are catered for.

 

Not everyone is interested in recording or reporting faults, of course, which is why the log is a switchable option, but the sheer convenience of having your PDA automatically restart following a failure should be attractive to almost anyone who has ever encountered software problems. This is a feature that should be part of the OS, in my opinion (or at the very least, the manual reset button should actually do something when tapped).

 

Whether everyone necessarily needs the full functionality of Crash Pro, of course, is a valid question. With the facilities offered by Crash fully adequate to the task of failure management, without the more advanced logging and configuration features, the freeware application may be enough to meet your needs. If you particularly like the idea of humorous images on failure, however, or you need to log error data or want access to the time configuration options then you will have to go down the Pro route.

 

The best thing about this sort of software is that you can try out the freeware application first and get a feel for the operation of the utility. Only having decided that it meets your needs need you consider if the extra functions are desirable enough to warrant the upgrade to the full application. Even then you get a license free period of three weeks in order to fully evaluate the extra capabilities of the program. (I cheated, of course, getting a licensed copy for the purposes of this review Thanks to Daniel at 79bmedia!)