A new update for Comic Life appeared the other day and I wasted no time downloading a copy. Dragged it right into my applications folder…hit the icon and got ready…splash screen appeared…then nothing…then a crash report. Tried another download, still wouldn’t run. Went to another machine, got a copy of 1.2.2 and reinstalled it. It worked fine.
Went to the second computer and tried the update sequence…went without a hitch. Hmmm…the two machines were nearly identical (10.4.5, roughly the same amount of memory, etc.). In desperation, I sent a note to Plasq (creators of Comic Life) and included my crash log. Then I noticed they had a forum on the site so I posted a note there as well. Didn’t expect to hear anything but you never know.
Next morning I got a note back from Plasq telling me that they were going to repost 1.2.2 for others having this problem and that they’d continue trying to figure it out (seems they’d seen two messages about it). Of course, the two they’d seen were both mine. I wrote back explaining that I was in fact all of the people reporting the problem–and thus a repost of 1.2.2 wasn’t really necessary.
About two hours later I got another email from Plasq, explaining that they were baffled by my crash dump. To make a long story a bit shorter, it turns out that they have (to quote their message) some “magic they perform with the InterfaceBuilder.framework to help when laying out the user interface” and it works even when it’s run on a machine that’s not a developer system. For reasons they couldn’t explain, my crash dump indicated that my machine thought it was a developer system and yet it crashed.
Well, that made perfect sense…about a month ago I uninstalled Xcode 2.2 on this particular machine (to get a bit more disk space) but my uninstall left bits & pieces lying about which fooled Comic Life. Solution? I reinstalled XCode (which I had been meaning to do anyway now that I have a new book on Cocoa programming) and voila!
Moral? Don’t ever uninstall Developer Tools unless you get it all. And, of course, the developers/support people at Plasq (like their software) are really first rate.