Using Instruments for Bug Reports

The release of Lightroom 2.0 has been great to work with. All the new features are just terrific. But, as happens with major releases, sometimes issues make it out into world. For example, the other day while processing thousands of photographs from a recent job, Lightroom stalled out on me with the dreaded spinning beach ball. Needless to say I wasn't thrilled. But a quick force quick and restart and I was on my way.

Until it happened again. This time, it happened as I was about to go out and run some errands, so I left it be to see if it would clear itself up. A few hours later when I returned, the beach ball was still spinning. I was just about to force quit the application and grab the resulting crash report to send on to Adobe when a touch of mild inspiration hit. I fired up Instruments, part of the Apple Xcode toolset, and ran it against Lightroom while it was hung up. Instead of just a static crash report resulting from a force quit, this results in a view into the application as it runs.

Once I had the trace from Instruments, I filed a bug report with Adobe and went on with my day of processing images while watching the Olympics on TV. A day later, one of the folks on the Lightroom team sent a message of thanks and indicated that it helped in tracking down a thorny bug they've been chasing. That made my day. Hopefully a fix for the problem will be part of the next minor update.

Sometimes, it's really hard for a software development team to get the right kind of information from users about what is tickling a problem. Vague descriptions and frustration are typically the rule of the day. Having been on the software development side of the fence myself, it was really nice to give something more concrete than just “it messed up.”