Re: [flasher] Mac OS 9.1 and F5

[John Dowdell]

At 5:39 AM 1/23/1, Matt wrote:

> does it fix the crash bug?


There is no "the" crash bug. There are lots of ways to crash on Macs.

Describing everything as "bug" doesn't let you pick apart the way that

*you* can find to move *your* work forward.


MacOS 9.1 does fix the system-level "too many temp files" issue. This

seemed to be the mystery cause behind the majority of "my mac crashes"

posts.


MacOS 9.1 necessarily forces you to go through another round of Kensington

trackball drivers, so unless new versions re-introduce the problem, you're

likely free of this potential mystery cause too.


Macs still have a fixed-memory allocation, and if you're one of those using

tons of bitmaps and audio in a piece then you'll still risk memory hits

when these assets are decompressed into RAM during authoring.


Bad VM settings still cause problems... we still see posts each week from

those who turn VM off, or who have big VM, instead of the "realRam + 1M"

that's recommended in Apple's docs. This is another way to fail.


I believe MacOS 9.1 includes new video drivers for many configurations, so

you likely won't see the video acceleration conflicts that were the root

cause for other people. I'd defer to experimentation on this, though... may

not update all video systems.



The only report I've seen so far about MacOS 9.1 and F5 is a single post

that invoking rulers would cause the display to go white, but this has not

been reproduced by others and the person apparently has not taken advantage

of their support contract so we can find out what video system they were

using. (This was in the long, long, MacFixIt thread... it's very difficult

to get diagnostic questions answered online, which is why support is

included with each purchase.)



MacOS 9.1 does introduce three issues with Dreamweaver 3, DW4, UltraDev 1 and 4:


--  Some-but-not-all GIFs are mismapped; unwanted black, loss of

transparency, etc. This seems due to the new assumptions made by QuickDraw

(see Apple technote #2010 and scroll, scroll, scroll). DW3 and above use

Apple imaging services directly, so we're vulnerable to changes in ways

that apps which use their own drawing routines do not. So far, taking these

particular GIFs and rewriting their palettes in Fireworks has seemed to

make correct GIFs. We're awaiting engineering confirmation before advising

the company which makes those problem GIFs.


--  Some are reporting a problem selecting text. The reports online are

still contradicting each other, but many seem to say that the problem only

occurs when they have varying other applications open. Some of these may be

hogging the clock, but the reports are still too fragmented to allow

reproduction. macromedia.dreamweaver newsgroup is the place.


--  Two or three say their UI is discolored in various ways. We're urging

these people to use their support contract so we can track the report... a

newsgroup post won't work. This has not been able to be repro'd in house

yet. Adobe's AfterEffects has some similar symptom presentations, so we may

share the same hidden cofactor here.



For more info on MacOS 9.1, look at the reports at MacInTouch and MacFixIt.


jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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