Re: Anti-freeze for Apple IIgs

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <6b1u0a$178o@enzu.unm.edu>, Jim Pittman <casa@unm.edu> wrote:
>I wonder if someone can improve on my list of tactics to minimize
>crashing/freezing in an Apple IIgs.

   Looking at your list, a few are directly dependent on the TextEdit
Toolset, Apple's "Word procesor in a box" for programmers to tap into.
Unfortunately, it's still got a lot of lurking bugs in it. (Brutal
Deluxe recently fixed just one problem in it so that it didn't just
hang the system and other unfriendly stuff if loading a file with more
than 1023 style changes in it, but that doesn't describe the problems
you're having. If there's a limit like that on style changes, then an
error *should* be reported, not just a hang.)

>ShadowWrite (actually Hermes 1.3.4) often freezes the Nth time I
>use it after restarting the computer, where N is a number usually
>higher than four or five but seldom as high as ten or twelve.

   Textedit.

>GraphicWriter III version 2

   Could be using textedit for some things internally, haven't
checked.

>Word Works Pro 2.1.2 can be counted on to freeze without warning
>about thirty percent of the time somewhere in the middle of doing
>complex things like a multiple find/replace.

   TextEdit. And errors during find/replace with textedit have been
recently reported on Delphi.

>Quickie v.2 crashes easily; versions 3.1 and 3.2 only occasionally.

   Probably not Textedit, but I've never used that software.

>2) Re-install GS/OS 6.0.1. Has rarely made much difference.

   TextEdit is part of 6.0.1, and is quite capable of messing up
when just installed, no corruption necessary at all.

>7) Use ShiftyList 2 to load only particular inits or load them
>   in a different order. So far I have found no combination
>   that improves or makes worse crashes/freezes.

   ShiftyList doesn't affect Apple's tools, see above.

>9) Install Message Checker 1.02. I very rarely see this kick
>   in before a crash; when it does, it tells me nothing I can
>   use to prevent future crashes.

   Well, it helps me, and I can use that to fix things later. It's
something of just a tripwire for when the system is about to blow up.

>10) Install GUPP 1.0.5f1. I can't tell whether this does any good.

   I don't touch TextEdit (yet?) from GUPP. BTW 1.0.6 is out, see my
web pages at http://www.visi.com/~nathan/a2/njmgssoft.html

>11) Install IR so I can get to the inits listed in #6 above if
>    and when I need them. (By the way, IR is a great utility and
>    I'd hate to do without it.)

   Tools are not inits, see Shiftylist above.

>17) Do Special / Shut Down / Restart fairly often, or go to Trans-
>    Prog III and select Quit Application and Cold Restart. This has
>    come to be my most-used tactic. Why should I have to do this?

   Because you-know-whom never got that toolset in good functioning
order. Some people that have worked at Apple said that TextEdit was
passed around from one disinterested intern to another. And thus, we
have a buggy component of the System Software too prevalent to try and
replace with something done right, and too much of a code nightmare
for people to want to debug easily. [Still waiting on a Prodev so I
can fix problems my other tools point out much easier]

>Despite many patches and bug fixes from SoftDisk and Nathan Mates'
>GUPP, I am sure there remain significant bugs in GS/OS 6.0.1 that
>will never be tracked down that contribute to my crashing/freezing
>problems, but it is amazing that several of my applications seem to
>be completely reliable. I wish I could make all of them so.

   Well, you've just been bit by the same set of bugs in a lot of
apps.  I've never made any claims of fixing every last bug via GUPP,
on the contrary, I've got a few hopefully obscure bugs that I can
reproduce (can you say "Buggy Sound Control Panel"?), but don't have
the hours necessary to fix the #$*(%^ thing by trying to trace out the
problem. That's why I want a hardware-assisted debugging setup to find
out precisely *when* a problem occurred. (That a problem occurred is
trivial to find. However, at near a million instructions per second
being executed on an accelerated GS, it takes a while for those
million to go by my brain for a sanity check)

   The best and most stable word processor on the GS is Appleworks
classic, v5.1. And that's really kinda pitiful in a way. AWGS (and
BeaglewriteGS/MultiscribeGS before it) is pretty darn buggy, while
TextEdit is a load of spaghetti code that mostly kinda works, but has
a lot of limitations). For the 'little brother' of the Mac, which has
had a good number of quality DTP and Word Processing programs, that's
not too good. AWGS is the victim of "ship it when the calendar says we
ship, not when it's stable". After that, Apple's TextEdit was designed
to be the engine for subsequent word processors (which is why there's
so many NDA word processors-- it's fairly simple). Too bad that engine
needs a serious tuneup.

Nathan Mates

--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
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