Getting a fair number of crashes on Mac

There are a few quirks I have noticed and that may be the cause of the crashes.  What seems to work pretty solidly is.
Open a recipe.
Create a folder to put it in. 
OOOps BS kept the focus on the imported recipe and created a folder in that tab.

Now this is a magig folder because you can put things in but you can't get them out.  You also can't move the folder.  The icon should really be a black hole.  But I have been here before so I know not to put anything in the magic folder and return focus to MY RECIPE's and.

Add a new folder.

Drag the imported recipe into the new folder (not the magic one).

SPOD for awhile then sudden quit.

BS doesn't save anything till it quits apparently so anything you have done since you opened the app is lost.

When you reopen BS there is a dialog telling you it's tossing some fine.

It would be nice if there were a way of saving the databases with out having to quit and reopen.

BS should really be doing some incremental saving along the line since you can't force a save.

I got BS because it was such a pain in Beer Alchemy when you needed an ingredient not in it's db.  You had to create it but you also had to save the recipe first.  It seems like a small thing but one recipe with five or six new things and it gets to be a big deal right away.

So I'm not unhappy with BS but it could use some stability.  I find it also a bit overly convoluted sometimes.  Where you are trying different modes because there is a function you want to use but you have to find the right mode for it to show up.
Over all it's a touch windows 3.1 klunky, not a lot but a little.  But it has a big easily expandable ingredients db and seems more able to deal with unusual brewing situations.

If it gets more stable I would probably give it three to three and a half stars, but it has promise to get to five (out of five).

Hi,
  The program does autosave when idle for several minutes, but not if you are constantly working.  I've made a note to have it autosave more often, and probably will put it on a timer instead of waiting for idle.

  I'm assuming you have the latest build 2.0.50 - as I've fixed a lot of stability issues in the last few updates.

  I'll try the items you mention above - would appreciate step-by-step instructions if you can get it to fail consistently.

Thanks,
Brad

Sorry for the late response, I didn't check back and didn't know you had responded.

Not sure what version I was on, I'm now on 2.0.57.

I'm not getting sudden crashes anymore but I do get a fair number of long SPOD's

I will preface with that I fairly recently updated to 10.6 on an original MBP and a number of things have gotten less stable so maybe it's not all BS's fault, though most of the wankyness has been with Apples own apps not others so?

What I was doing today that was causing grief was adding some malts.  I just bought a bunch from Canada Malting (which doesn't seem to be in any of the plugins) so I was adding their malts to the list.  I can add one or two and then I will get a SPOD that goes on for a minute or so.  It's like it's taking a time out to save, but it happens at random places while adding the new grain.

I also notice as a general thing that BS seems to take a long time to load.  I have noticed this with programs written in Java in general so if that is what BS is programed in it may just be Java doing it's thing.

I will try out the things I mentioned before and see if I'm still seeing any of them.

I'm also planning on doing a clean reinstall of everything this week to see if that clears up some of the general crankiness I'm seeing with 10.6.

I'll make a note to check back with the results.

Cheers
SK

Scott Koue
www.scottkouesound.com
http://imdb.com/name/nm0468138/

Scott,
  The long load time and long delays are probably related to a lot of recipes in your database.

  BeerSmith does load the entire set of recipes into memory on loadup, and now autosaves periodically which is probably causing the delays.

Brad

Hmmm.

So the solution is to not keep many recipes in the app?
That doesn't sound all that great.  I'm also wondering if your saving more than nec.?  If I'm just working on a recipe then not much has changed and that should be a very short bit of background work.  I was working on recipes just now and was getting regular 40 sec or so SPODs (beachballs).

I also got this error message twice (I closed and reopened in between)

wxWidgets Debug Alert

/Users/Doc/documents/src/wx/include/wx/dynarray.h(833):
assert "uilndex <m_nCount" failed in Item().

Do you want to stop the program?

Anyway I will keep playing with it but I may have to switch back to Beer Alchemy for regular use till some of this gets sorted out.
The flexibility of BS will keep me coming back but the SPODs are wasting a LOT of time.

I added 6 malts and modified three recipes and it's taken about an hour and a half to do about half an hour of work...

Again some of this may be my system being wonky so I'll re do that and report back.

BA doesn't have the issues but then that may be because it has been on a lot longer and beat the OS update?

Hi,
  I'm going to make the autosave times customizable in the next version.  Several people wanted the autosave to happen more often, so I shortened the time but others want it not to autosave so I'm going to put it in options so you can change it to suit your needs.

  Also I'm adding an option to autosave only when idle for a certain amount of time.

Brad

hope that helps.  I do a small amount of programing so I'm not unsympathetic to the moving target of "perfection".

Cheers
SK

Scott Koue
Web Page
IMDB
Noiz on Noise
Bug’n out of Babylon
Send me a file

Thought I would add that I went back to Beer Alchemy and remembered why I bought BeerSmith ;~)

I like the look and feel better of BA and I think maybe it's worth a look by your UI designer since it is much less confusing ,as in why is inventory not on the same tab as ingredients?  But the flexibility is a killer.  You can't do simple things like add sugar to a Belgian in the last 15 min.  it's either all of the boil or after the boil.  So you have to write a lot of notes.

I keep thinking if you two got married I would love the children.

Anyway for all the little things like the auto save hangs - and I feel guilty for that because I think an issue I reported may have gotten that added to the app - BS has the flexibility to actually document my recipes.