When Fontlab crashes on Snow Leopard the whole OS crashes

[JamesMontalbano]

Like the subject says. I've been working on 10.6 for a week know and FontLab is behaving itself, and actually feels a bit more stable. But I have had two crashes, and the entire OS goes down. I get a blue screen and the desktop eventually emerges. I can't tell you what i did to cause the crash. It seemed random.

James

[drayon]

I can confirm the same problem on Snow Leopard.

You guys need to update this ancient application. It is very buggy and crashy not to mention you've had 3 years to produce an Intel version. I can't fathom how you can justify selling this product for any more than 20 dollars.

[jamespuckett]

I guess we’re stuck with 10.5 until 2017!

[JamesMontalbano]

Continued working and I've experienced four more crashes. All take down the OS for a few moments. Nothing I can point to. One crash when I was editing hints, one when I was entering text into the classes window. one when I was moving a component, one when I was adding a new kerning class.

Please look into this.

[Bas]

I experience the same. After installing Snow Leopard (+Rosetta), FontLab Studio 5 crashes a couple of times an hour, and sometimes makes the OS crash. Can't find a system or pattern or cause, seems random.

groet,
Bas

[Alex Petrov (FontLab)]

I guess we’re stuck with 10.5 until 2017!

Why 2017? 

[Adam Twardoch (FontLab)]

That's not good news. We will look into this problem and try to come up with a solution.

[drayon]

That's not good news. We will look into this problem and try to come up with a solution.

The solution: Rewrite FLS from scratch as a fresh new 64 bit Cocoa Application using all the modern frameworks and support the new OS's TrueType Collection 'ttc' format.

Pointless continuing with this decade+ old codebase. Mac ToolBox, QuickDraw and PPC have long since been obsolete. Carbon is on the chopping block as we speak, it will not be supporting 64bit.

[Adam Twardoch (FontLab)]

I wish it were so simple.

As far as I can tell, neither Photoshop nor Illustrator, not even InDesign has been "rewritten from scratch", and none of them is purely 64 bit — and Adobe has probably 1000x as many software developers as we have. Even Apple only has rewritten some applications from Carbon to Cocoa just now, with 10.6 (including Finder). I think if Finder is Carbon-based in 10.5, then the API it's not that much on the chopping block quite yet.

We do have a dual plan though. Our current FontLab codebase, codenamed "Leningrad" is indeed quite old. FontLab Studio 5 for Mac is still PowerPC-only since it was built using Metroworks CodeWarrior: a PowerPC development environment that has been created long before Apple introduced their XCode. It was a reasonable environment but the problem with it was that Metroworks sold their Intel compiler to some other company short before Apple announced that it’s transitioning to Intel technology from PowerPC.

So for FontLab Studio 6, we're moving the codebase to XCode, which is not trivial. But we'll build it as a universal application that will use a more modern UI and the internals will be a much better port of the Windows codebase, which is actually rock-solid. In FontLab Studio 5, the Windows Intel code has been translated into PowerPC code, which then is being translated back to Intel through Rosetta. This will all go away with FLS6.

For FontLab Studio 7, which will be based on a new codebase "Victoria", we are separating the user interface completely from the internals, and rewriting much of the application from scratch.

In fact, some of this work is happening right now since we are working on Fontographer 5, which will be a blend of the FontLab Studio technology back-end and the simple and stable Fontographer UI (with some improvements).

[Bas]

The current situation is infeasible.

1) Fix it, make a proper version for OSX 10.6 (when can we expect this?)
2) Users should downgrade to OSX 10.5

What does FontLab recommend?

[drayon]

Ah yes CodeWarrior the ugly old days haha. BTW in 10.6 the only applications that are now Carbon are iTunes, and DVD Player. Everything else has gone Cocoa 64 bit. Apple vocally told all developers 2.5+ years ago that Carbon will not be moving to 64 bit. It should have been perfectly clear to anyone listening to realize that the OS is moving to completely Cocoa 64 bit that was before Leopard. We are here now at 10.6. Another 5% of work to the road to 64 bit and it will be complete. I expect 10.7 will be booting from a 64 bit kernel and all Apple apps will easily be 64 bit Cocoa and I'd expect the arrival of the Resolution Independent UI to be showing up. iTunes has yet to make the Cocoa 64Bit move since it is tied to Quicktime and now that QT has finally made the leap we should expect a Cocoa 64bit itunes within a year. FWIW the 10.6 Cocoa Finder is so much faster than the old Carbon Finder. It is rather astonishing.

I understand the situation now that it has been explained. The point still stands, an I know it is not trivial but the writing was on the wall , Apple made it loud and clear that dev's should start moving to XCode at least 3-4 years ago. Fontlab should have begun it's migration to XCode way back then since at this point you'd only be focusing on compiling to 64 bit as all the back end and hard work would have been  sorted out 2 years ago. One thing that has miffed me about many of these cross platform developers, and that is developing on Windows and porting to the Mac, it is amazing how much trouble they put themselves thru. It would be far less work, much easier and faster deployment to do all the code in XCode/Cocoa on the Mac and then port to Windows.

Adobe is not really a fine example. In any case they have officially said they are currently re-writing all their apps for CS5 from the ground up in Cocoa 64 bit. It's about friggin time they figured that out. All that time they have wasted on hacking that massive codebase on wobbly old school api's is eye rolling material. They can no longer excusing themselves on the premise of waiting for Apple's API's to mature, time is now.

I appreciate you for providing some details on development strategy/roadmap.

Curious sidenote regarding the comments about the Windows codebase. As you declare the Windows FLS5 code to be rock solid can you comment on the viability, usability, caveats/limitations, possible gotcha's and gremlins that may occur if working purely with Mac font's? IOW is the Mac feature set lacking on the Windows version and are there any possible Windows platform peculiarities that may mess up working with Mac fonts? Finally does the Windows version support opening/generating of TrueType Collections? Considering it has been a Windows platform format since the mid 90's and only recently supported in full on the Mac starting with 10.6.

Thanks so much for your post, it proved very valuable.

[adlb]

I installed Snow Leopard the day it came out onto a two-year-old MacBook Pro that up until that point was still operating on 10.4. Since upgrading, I have worked in FLS5 only sparingly but have not experienced any crashes. However, it is extremely disconcerting to read of others' problems along those lines on this thread and to receive an email from FontLab that opens with "We thought we had dodged this bullet." I haven't a clue where my original install discs for my MacBook are in order to downgrade from Snow Leopard back to Tiger (not to mention I would really rather avoid this!). FontLab's email cites Adobe CS2 as one of several other programs with known conflicts. I use CS2 applications daily and haven't experienced any crashes or problems whatsoever.

I agree with others on this thread that, given the high cost of FLS, it's not unreasonable to expect that FontLab's tech team could do a better job adapting to changes in Apple's platform. If, as drayon says, the migration over to XCode has been a known fact for several years now, then why is FontLab so far behind the curve?

[Wowzera]

FontLab Studio can't be compared to Adobe Photoshop or any other junk programs from them. The main problem of FontLab Studio is it's core, whose still is based on PowerPC. You can keep using Carbon, but at least port it to Intel, 32bit architecture probably will still be supported from Apple until 10.8. PowerPC is deprecated, that's a fact.
I've already experience the bug that FontLab Studio will crash the system (it's same of a logout, kill all programs and then come back after some seconds), although it does not happen very often it's still annoying.

The most elegant solution:
Port to Cocoa.
If you port your code from Carbon to Cocoa and build it with XCode under Snow Leopard it won't support PowerPC anymore (you can link PPC users to the current FontLab Studio version) but it will be a 64 bits application and everyone will be happy!
I'm not a developer, but as far as I know, it is not so hard to do the port:
Carbon -> Cocoa.
FontLab isn't a small company, I think that with its current developers FontLab Studio can be a full 64bits Cocoa application until the end of this year!

Best wishes for all the team!

[Alex Petrov (FontLab)]

FontLab isn't a small company

Wow! How did you know?! 

[Wowzera]

FontLab isn't a small company

Wow! How did you know?! 

By the very high price they charge for their software

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