Caroline's Painter Insights

I wanted to make an appeal to our users to help improve the quality of Painter going forward. 

The idea for this post came to me when one of the applications that I use everyday crashed on me. The first thing that happened was that Windows Error Reporting began to generate a crash report. So, as I'm sure most people would, I hit Cancel and went back to what I was doing. It was then that I realized that this is probably what happens when Painter crashes. You hit Cancel and try to get back to where you were. Sure, if things get bad enough or if the crashes persist, you might drop in to a newsgroup to complain about the problem, but in most instances, there are probably more important things on your mind, like your task at hand.

My request to you is, if Painter crashes, please take a minute and let Windows finish generating the crash report.  

We hate crashes and we take them very seriously. We make every effort to ensure that Painter is as solid as possible and ships with no known crashes. The problem is, it's impossible for us to anticipate all the differences in computers, workspaces and workflows. So, inevitably, some crashes remain. We're far more effective working from crash reports than anecdotal post on forums.

When we receive a crash report we get an anonymous email that includes detailed information about the state Painter was in when it crashed. We don't get any information about the user nor anything about the documents you were working on. These crash reports are extremely helpful in finding the cause of problems in our code. Plus, the more duplicate reports we get, the higher the priority we assign to the defect. In fact, if we get enough duplicates, we'll usually try to fast-track a fix and get it out to our users as fast as possible.

Now, on the Mac, you need to do a little more work. If you run in to a crash on the Mac, you first need to click on the Report... button:

And then click the Send to Apple button.

So, please remember to hit 'Send' on those crash reports. It really goes a long way towards improving the quality of Painter.

EDIT: I forgot an important part of this process. On the next launch after a crash on the Mac, you'll see this dialog:

Please hit send here too!