OmniOutliner for Mac 4.2.1

It’s on the Omni website and will be on the Mac App Store once approved. (In a week, give or take, I suppose.)

I like this particular release a ton because we concentrated on fixing crashing bugs to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Ideally we’d have zero known crashing bugs. OmniOutliner isn’t quite there, but it can see that promised land from where it stands.

Argument about crashes

You could argue that fixing crashes isn’t that important these days. The risk of data loss isn’t what it was, now that so many apps do auto-saving, syncing, and state restoration. And re-launching an app is much quicker than it used to be. (Remember the old days of counting the number of bounces in the Dock?)

So a crash is really just a slight annoyance, you could argue — and you could argue that users take the occasional crash in stride.

I understand the argument, and I disagree. Each crash means somebody got a little surprised and angry, even if only for a moment — and that’s hard to wave away. If you care about your craft, you care deeply that what you make never unintentionally makes somebody mad.

And it’s also notable that once a user triggers a particular crash, they’re fairly likely to hit it again. Maybe it’s something about their document, or their machine, or the steps they’re taking to accomplish a certain task.

That person won’t be slightly annoyed at the second and third crashes. That person is — quite rightly — going to email support, particularly if the crash stops them from completing their work. So now the crash, however rare, is costing the developer time and money. (If you don’t buy the craft argument, you should buy this pragmatic one.)

Software doesn’t have to crash. You may think that it’s an idealistic goal, but it’s not — it’s do-able (I’ve done it; other people have done it), and it matters.