Xpanel For Mac
I’m looking for some help with this crash log I have. I’m trying to see if anyone can help me trace what can be causing this app to crash, therefore fixing my problem. I have a remote iMac running Lion 10.7.5 which is used to control a Crestron system in the apartment, among other basic things – email, browsing the web, setting up my calendar and that’s pretty much it. No heavy usage, gaming or any crazy software installed on it. The XPanel app is pretty simple and straight forward to use. You actually can’t do much with it, it’s basically an interface to connect and control your main Crestron controller via a.xpnl file which holds the server IP, ports, user/pass, etc.
It never gave me any issues in the past, although few months ago it just stopped working. I would double click my.xpnl file to establish the connection and wait for it to load all the controls but immediately before it finishes connecting, XPanel would crash and a Crash Report was generated – which I’ll attach to the post. It also started to crash on a second Mac I have, this one with Mavericks 10.9.1. A call to their “True Blue Support” wasn’t much of a help. Basically they pinpointed the issue being with the OS and told me to bring the computer to the Apple Store. Because the crash is happening only on these two machines and I was able to re-create the connection on other Macs, they will not debug the error or even take a look on the issue. So to the Genius Bar I took offlong story shortOf course they wouldn’t admit it was an OS X issue and told me to contact Crestron tech support.
As a “courtesy” they ran tests, diagnostics, basic repairs and etc - which did not solve the problem. As a possible solution they suggested to re-load the OS. Back to the office I end up doing just that – both machines got their OS reloaded and voila, XPanel started working again. And it worked for a few months until a couple of days ago when stopped working again and crashing just like before.
One possibility I see going on here is that someone is doing some “cleaning” on the system or running some tool/app to delete temporary files, cache, or something like that and breaking whatever XPanel needs to properly function. Of course when I asked around the office nobody knows anything about it, nobody touched the machine, nobody cleaned anything and so on.
Xpanel For Mac
So I’m still looking for what can be causing this crash. The code crashed in a drawing routine. I edited the post to show you the relevant thread 0 that was responsible for the crash (if you trust the logs and in this case, everything seems normal and this is a user program crash, so it's generally more reliable than a kernel log). Three things can be done to reduce or eliminate the crash:. Figure out what part of the drawing code is responsible for the crash over time and reduce / eliminate that part of the program by not using it.
Get the source code and fix it (it could also be an Apple Bug where you need to update the OS or even upgrade to really fix the issue.) Only someone with access to the source code generally can make that call. Change the data the program uses (remove some settings, features, etc) and hope that it reduces the chance the program has to draw the same data in the crashing routine. Also, there is a 4th item - it could be a somewhat random occurrence. Unless you can discover how to make things crash each and every time, it's best to keep a paper (or other) log of when it crashes and save the logs. After about 10 times patterns usually start to form that help you know what is causing a crash. I've googled this issue a bit and was not able to find much about it, although the one piece of information I was able to find pointed to a bug either on the app side or something that became 'broken' on the OS side - even a missing kext. Unfortunately I don't have access to the source code since this is a commercial application not owned by me or my company.
I did do some tinkering with a few files called by XPanel in regards to resolution, position, etc but without any luck. Will keep trying!
Thanks for your insight, @bmike! – Feb 18 '14 at 16:03.