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Subject: Re: [flasher] Mac OS 9.1 and F5
From: John Dowdell
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 19:57:32 -0000

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
Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
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