Improve crash handling (Mac OSX)

[Helmi74]

Greetings,

unfortunately Fusion360 still crashes way more than it should (tho things seem to get better). While crash recovery is very useful and most of the time quite up to date (if it works at all) the access of crashed files is a bit weird on Mac OSX and i think this should be improvied, especially for fresh users that are not so much used to what's going on.

The problem is you can easily miss existing recovery files as there's only a System notification that hides itself after a few seconds and is then only visible in the notification sidebar that is hidden by default. You have to open this and depending on other notification of other applications you can then more or less easily find the notification from Fusion360. Additionally you have to know that only clicking this notification brings up another dialog from Fusion360 that shows which Files are available for recovery. That is not very handy and i think newbies completely miss this.

Suggestions:

1. Make the system notification sticky. Mac OSX notifications have an option for additional buttons. For example Update notifications from the Mac App store use this for important updates where you can opt to install now from the notification with the click of a button. This should be used to make the notification sticky and can also be used to show the user that there's an action when clicking the notification.

2. Alter the UI of Fusion360 itself to show available notifications. As far as i understand Fusion360 (like all other 360 desktop applications) splits into two parts: the local application itself with the "application frame" and the dashboard which basically is a website. As i understand only the local application knows of existing recovery files and it is hard or impossible to show these files as alert or even more eyecatching notification in the dashboard it should be possible to use the local application to handle this a bit smarter than now. I've been crazy enough to use all my available design skills (yes, that's all) to mockup something that i could imagine useful:

Bam, that's it 😉 I'm sure there will be a more designful way to integrate this but i also think this could be something that is eyecatching enough and if combined with a simple dropdown showing the file name and the last save date of the recovery file this could be easily used even by beginners and can't be overseen accidently.

I don't know much how crash handling is done in windows as i only use the virtual machine to try a bit with beta versions not available on OSX (like documentation and cam360) but luckily didn't have much crashes there until now.

[Oceanconcepts]

I posted about this here a long time ago, to say that the steps needed to recover a file are really not intuitive or clear. The dialog that comes up when you click on recover is easy for new users to misinterpret- does OK mean the file will open? No, actually… you need to do a couple more things. 

Frank's suggestion is much better- a clear indication in Fusion.

[roambotics_scott]

Maybe also a code audit to find and replace things like pointers with references and the such, and switching as much as possible to availiable and well designed / tested container libraries (presumably STL if it's written in C++).

I haven't looked at the source but have the feeling that the bulk of these issues come down to poor / sloppy coding practice and things that could be easily prevented like freeing memory then trying to access it.

It occurs to me that assuming the unstable code is shared between OS X and Windows and the windows version isn't so unstable, there could also be something as simple as just playing with compiler options - maybe Visual Studio's compilers are adding in bounds checking or something similar that could be turned on in CLANG / LLVM.. of course that said it'd just be a band-aid and more likely than not there's a slew of compiler warnings for most of the issues that are just being ignored or silenced.

[sore.thumb.dev]

Just want to ask - does anyone know of a method (no matter how unconventional) one could go about recovering a file in the latest version of A360?  That is, the version without the dashboard page embedded in the UI - the one with the "Data Panel" instead.

I've never even been able to recover a temporary back up on my Mac.  I see the thread of various backups listed in the Notification sidebar but, as mentioned by Helmi74, it does no more than open the application.  The difference now is that I NEVER see a dialog providing the option to recover from an auto backup.

Just wondering how to cope with the frequent, inexplicable crashes on Mac.

[keqingsong]

Agreed, this is something we are currently planning to get fixed. 

[Helmi74]

oh wow, only took 15 months to get a response on that 😉

[bguset]

This is sooooo needful now. I didn't realize this was a long standing request (I am a Mac user too). I hope you bring this idea right to the top of the pile now cause for many of us this really is crummy the way it works (actually fails to work most of the time).