First, thank you for reporting bugs! Identifying, reproducing, and documenting bugs is not always fun or easy, but it’s an important part of making excellent software. It can also be rewarding, as you’ll have a direct influence on the applications. We really, honestly appreciate your help.
Not all issues are as clear-cut as an application crash or hang. (But we definitely want to know about those, too!) As you use the application, anything that strikes you as weird, unexpected, or broken is important to let us know about.
Report everything that you find. An issue might be glaringly obvious to you, but if you don’t report it, we may not even know about it.
Please make sure to include as much detailed information about the issue as possible.
See the section below for more information about what helpful things to include!
No matter what the bug is, we will always want to know the same information:
One or more of those may seem stupid or self-explanatory to you, but it’s extremely helpful to us if you take the time to write it all out. Don’t assume we know anything! Perhaps you learned how to do something in another app, and we have a totally different way to accomplish the same thing. Simply saying that something “doesn’t work” isn’t very helpful; spell it out for us as simply and clearly as possible.
Any supporting information you can think to add will be appreciated. Attach anything you think might be helpful. Some examples:
If a computer stops working or an application goes unresponsive, you might say that it crashed. To a software engineer, a crash is a very specific thing, and it may not be what you meant.
A crash occurs when an application can no longer continue to function, so it quits. Mac OS X says the app unexpectedly quit. The application stops running and writes out a report or log describing what happened. If you encounter an honest-to-goodness crash, we absolutely want to know about it.
Your crash log is helpful, but we’ll probably need more information. Please describe the steps you took to make the crash occur and attach the crash log to your bug.
Sometimes you’ll see the colorful spinning pinwheel icon, lovingly referred to as the beachball of death. We call this a hang, and it means the application is waiting on some other process to complete before ours can finish what it was doing. Though most hangs are temporary, it’s possible to get stuck in a never-ending spinning-beachball loop, and the only way out is to Force-Quit by pressing ⌥⌘⎋.
A kernel panic is a kind of system-wide crash. The screen goes gray and a message appears telling you in several different languages that you need to restart your Mac. Usually kernel panics happen deep down in the operating system. Though they may be triggered by our app, the bug probably lies outside of our code. Report these to us all the same. At the very least, we can pass your reports onto Apple.
If you ever have any questions or general feedback for us, please reach out!