User

04.02.2011 08:20:57

Hi,

I use remote buddy on a daily basis to control EyeTV (mainly). Over and over I have noticed that after while the program will become unresponsive. 
Sometimes it is possible to force-quit the application and start it again, after all would be well for a while.

However, the last time it occurred (today) remote buddy did not react to a force-quit command. I initiated a restart from the apple menu. 
The restart was cancelled with the system message " you haven't been logged out because the application remote buddy failed to quit....." 
The entire system became unresponsive, I could not even move the (wired) mouse.

I had to restart the machine by holding down the power button for a number of seconds. Personally, I really don't like that method.

I am a 'real' user of remote buddy. Sometimes it does not perform as you would expect and I feel I should share that here. I am looking forward to the next version in which everything will work just fine.

C 

User

04.02.2011 12:29:01

Thanks for your report.

What you describe is atypical and it's very likely that outside factors that are not under Remote Buddy's control lead to the phenomena you describe.

To investigate further on what is happening on your system when Remote Buddy is unresponsive on your machine, I'll need more information from you:

1) When the "hang" occurs, please start /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app (AM), select "Remote Buddy" from the list, then select "Analyze process" from AM's toolbar or AM's menu. Please cut and paste the result and send it to me.

2) To get an idea of what your machine looks like, please send me a system profile. Therefore, launch /Applications/Utilities/System Profiler.app (SP), then select "Save as.." from SP's menu. Please choose the XML format and send me the file you save.

For sending both pieces of information, please use the email address from the imprint ( http://www.iospirit.com/imprint/ ).

...

Regarding the "force quit doesn't work": there's nothing in Remote Buddy that could prevent it from being force quit. On a healthy system, this will always work. Remote Buddy is really just a normal application like any other application.

There are, however, general situations, where quit and force quit won't work on many applications on a system, and that neither have to do with or are specific to Remote Buddy. The same situations may also turn applications unresponsive without the application causing this state or being in the position to do anything about it. So, possibly, both of your issues eventually end up being caused by the same basic - and general - problem on your system.

Examples for such situations include:

a) external harddrive / network volume disconnect or I/O error. I've seen this a lot with external Western Digital drives (especially if they try to implement "power saving" on their own - I eventually stopped using two MyBook drives because of their unreliability) and - often enough - with Windows/SMB/Samba shares. When this occurs, many basic filesystem operations will never complete, causing the application to first hang, then the inability to force quit the applications because of unfinished/hanging I/O operations. This one's easy to identify, though: just try to access the volumes in question with the Finder. If the Finder locks up now, too (or just never presents the content), you know which drive/volume is causing you trouble. For USB drives, at least OS X Snow Leopard returns to normal operation when unplugging the respective drive (=> warning: just unplugging a drive may lead to data loss on that drive). If I recall correctly, unplugging the drive won't make any difference on earlier releases of OS X.

b) the use of IORegistryExplorer from the Xcode Developer Tools. There appears to be a bug in this tool that - under some circumstances - prevents services inside the kernel's IOKit from terminating. Running this tool for a prolonged time, I always end up in a situation where pretty much any application starts to hang sooner or later and then can't be force quit, either. I can reproduce this on a pristine, fresh install of OS X, too. Likewise, other tools (although I'm not aware of any existing) that dive deep into the kernel's IOKit and register for notifications on all of the services in the kernel may cause similar issues.

In both cases, you'll often be able to permanently "hang" pretty much any application by doing things as simple as trying to open a file with them - using the standard "open file" dialog window.

I may be able to say more - or even pinpoint a basic problem of your system - when I have seen the System Profiler profile for your system.

Best regards, 
Felix Schwarz 

User

04.02.2011 13:02:03

Dear Felix,

Thanks for another very long reply. It strikes me that you put a lot of effort in replying to customers about your application and I wonder how you have any time left for development at all.

As for the contents of your explanations, I think you'd be best of directing those to Mr. Jobs.as I am not inclined to do much with them.

Mr Jobs would be a far better discussion partner then I am on things like: 
- What causes to hang remote buddy sometimes and how a system could become unresponsive while that happens, 
- How an AJAX remote web application / safari browser combination run on Apple hardware/software can render an iPhone useless for a while, 
- Which elements/features of remote buddy would potentially render the application 'unwelcome' on Apple's app store and and how to overcome this (it gives people a lot of trust to see an app be approved by Apple, I think you should go for it).

For me the best solution at the moment is de-installation. I will tryout an alternative for the time to come.

All the best with iospirit. Really. 
C

User

04.02.2011 16:44:01

 
 
Simple. There simply aren't many customers having any issues. And with those that have, I usually successfully work with them to find a solution. Most of the time the problem is rooted in the software (mostly system-wide hacks and patches that inject code in every application and change the behavior of standard APIs, which then no longer work as documented and produce errors in other applications) or hardware they use. Very rarely (now that Remote Buddy matured for almost five years), someone finds an actual bug in Remote Buddy. Which I then happily fix, verify with the customer and release an update for.

 
Mr. Jobs - or any of the plenty people inside Apple that are using Remote Buddy - have not brought any problems with Remote Buddy to my attention. Not few told me they absolutely love it, though.

 
Huh?!

 
1) This is an issue you're having on your system. 
2) It's not a general issue. 
3) There are indications that what you see is the side effect of a basic, more fundamental issue on your system, which Remote Buddy is affected by - but not involved in causing it. 
4) All I can do is offer you my help in finding out what's going on - which, by its very nature, needs your cooperation. There is no other way of finding the root of a problem other than to examine it. 
5) Without your cooperation, I will not be able to help you.

 
With Mr. Jobs, I feel there wouldn't be any discussion. He'll already know that no web application can cause such an issue. They run fully sand-boxed and have no access to the system at all - a big win for security. If they had, Apple would have put an approval process in place just like with native apps that are found on the App Store.

I've already explained this to you at length in reply to your previous post. And every other professional developer will be able to tell you the same.

 
Remote Buddy was a "Staff Pick" on apple.com's Mac OS X Downloads page (which was replaced by the Mac App Store on January 6th, 2011). Remote Buddy has also received a great number of recommendations and awards from leading Mac publications. And it has won any comparative tests with other remote control software that I'm aware of - including the one in Europe's largest IT magazine (German c't).

I guess this can be seen as a sufficient amount of approval and trust. From Apple and other, well-respected parties.

- Felix Schwarz