My company just bought MadExcept, and I'm working on integrating it. While some of us were talking about it we had an idea.
In a nutshell instead of a single screenshot it would be awesome to see the last 5-10 seconds of what the user was clicking and typing, just before the error occurred.
Do you think it would be possible? Maybe just record the last 5 seconds of mouse and keyboard events, and active window lists, or possibly multiple screen shots, or ideally a flash movie? I know this might be pie-in-the-sky, but it would be incredibly useful to diagnose problems.
Maybe it would be a separate application that is only used when diagnosing a difficult problem.
What do you think?
Regards,
Jim Cullison
Suggestion
The problem with taking multiple screenshots is that depending on the graphics card and drivers it may cost noticable performance, it may make the mouse movement jerky and it may even stop double clicks from working (I've already experienced that in a remote control software I wrote). So it's not a good idea to take screenshots all the time.
A different thing is to record multiple screenshots etc if the user is able to reproduce the problem and wants to show you how by recording a movie for you. But this is really a bit outside of the scope of madExcept.
Recording mouse/keyboard events and the active window list is theoretically possible, but I'm not sure how useful it would really be without screenshots.
Whatever, madExcept allows you to add every kind of information you like. So I suggest that you collect all the information you like and add it to madExcept's bug reports yourself. It's quite easy to do so. Just call RegisterExceptionHandler to be notified when an exception occurred. Then you can add lines to the bug report header, or you can add whole multi line sections to the bug report.
Does that help?
A different thing is to record multiple screenshots etc if the user is able to reproduce the problem and wants to show you how by recording a movie for you. But this is really a bit outside of the scope of madExcept.
Recording mouse/keyboard events and the active window list is theoretically possible, but I'm not sure how useful it would really be without screenshots.
Whatever, madExcept allows you to add every kind of information you like. So I suggest that you collect all the information you like and add it to madExcept's bug reports yourself. It's quite easy to do so. Just call RegisterExceptionHandler to be notified when an exception occurred. Then you can add lines to the bug report header, or you can add whole multi line sections to the bug report.
Does that help?
Re: movie just before error
Yes that does help. I did see an example of a plugin exception handler here in the forum, so I will investigate that.
I recognize that the responsiveness would be impacted if it were continuously recording the screen, so whatever the solution, it would have to be something that the user would turn on when they know how to reproduce a problem.
Thanks for your comments!
Jim
I recognize that the responsiveness would be impacted if it were continuously recording the screen, so whatever the solution, it would have to be something that the user would turn on when they know how to reproduce a problem.
Thanks for your comments!
Jim