Crashing a lot

[Ken]

I've been using FCD for a couple months with a 2000-card text-only deck (and a couple smaller text-only decks, but that was the one I spent 99% of time time in). This week I've been trying out a small deck with images, and a larger deck with sounds.

I ran into a number of issues with just getting the cards imported -- I'll write up a list of the issues I had later, because that might be of interest to you.

But this week I've been running into an awful lot of crashes. (That's what "spontaneously exits and goes to the iOS home screen" is, right?) Crashes at times like:
- when rotating the screen with an image on it
- when switching back to FCD from another app, or leaving FCD to go to another app
- when importing a new deck (especially!)

I'm doing a binary search of imports right now, to see if there's a particular line that it's dying on in my deck. I guess it isn't a terribly useful report, to say that the app tends to crash a lot, but I don't know what else I can give you. :/

[Ernie]

Ken,

Shoot, not what I like to hear. I don't know of any issues with the current version, so its hard to imagine what is going on. A couple options:

1) Delete and reinstall the app. I do know that this will fix issues sometimes (especially dealing with pictures/sounds), though I'm not sure for your case, but I think it's worth a try. Make sure you carefully backup your decks (Export back to my server from within the app) if you deside to do this.

2) Send me crash logs. You might be able to find this on your computer after you sync with iTunes:
Mac OS X : ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME>
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/<DEVICE_NAME>
Windows Vista: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME
Look for "Flashcards_......crash"


Keep me updated and let me know how it goes. You mentioned importing issues, so I'd like to hear comments on that also if you have the time.

Ernie

[Ken]

After syncing, the latest FCD crash logs there all date to November 17th, with "iOS 4.1". (That's probably the "export with email not configured" crash I saw before.) I don't think there's any use in sending you those.

I don't know what this means -- it's crashing before the crash-log-writer gets a chance to do its thing, perhaps?

I did a binary-search on subsets of my TSV file to see if there was one line where it was failing. I ended up looking at a perfectly innocent-looking line. (Correct number of tabs, not the longest line, no invalid-looking characters, etc.) I've played around, and found it not 100% repeatable: one time it'll crash on a subset of the first 2/3 of this TSV file (at the end of the Saving Cards step), but if I do exactly the thing again, it'll get to the Downloading Media step just fine.

I'm still playing with it -- maybe it'll import the whole file once and that'll be good enough for me. I'm hesitant to try something drastic sounding like backing up, uninstalling, and reinstalling, if I can avoid it.

[Ken]

It does seem to crash reliably when I import the entire TSV file, before it gets to the "downloading media" stage, and it crashes even if I rename it so it wouldn't be able to find the sound files anyway. So I could (compress and) email you my text file if you want to try it for yourself.

It's quite possible there's something stupid I'm doing, again, and you'll be able to point it out quickly.

[Ernie]

Please, email me your .txt file. I'll then check it out.

Ernie
et@orangeorapple.com

[Ken]

I sent you the file, but I don't think that's the cause, now.

I asked online for general suggestions to stop iOS apps from crashing, and somebody suggested it could be running out of memory. The suggestion was to quit everything, reboot, and see if that helps. (This seemed to match the symptoms, even: it worked for smaller files, but not larger.)

Amazingly, it does. I killed all the apps (don't know if that's necessary), rebooted it, and then very first thing, with nothing else running, imported my entire file, including the media.

I don't know if this is an issue with FCD, or iOS, or what, but now I can study my entire file, so yay!

[Ernie]

Ah great! I forgot about this possible cause and should have mentioned that. Every few days I just remove all my apps from memory. The iPhone is suppose to handle this automatically (clear memory as needed), but it seems it needs some manual help sometimes.

Thanks for figuring this out.