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Once upon a time, programmers got the idea to make software that, in as many situations as possible, gave an error message when something went wrong instead of just crashing... and to create messages for as many specific situations as possible that were actually helpful.
It seems like that notion has largely died out. Phone apps don't give anything at all; they just vanish without even an acknowledgement that anything happened. On the actual computer, entirely too often the message is "[desired activity] failed because an error occurred" or something equally useless. The last few days, I've been using iDVD to make discs out of old home videos. It's pretty good, for the most part, and I was sorry to hear it's been discontinued... but if there's anything it doesn't like about the contents of a disc, it tends to work fine in preview mode, then quit entirely during encoding.
When that happens, it could be caused by pretty much anything, and only extensive trial and error will determine what (if even that works.) The one I'm doing now, it seems to have been my choice of font for menu labels. Why that should matter, I don't know. Another disc, shortening the menu loop fixed it. Another, simply deleting the project and creating the *exact same disc* over again worked. Another, I had to go back and re-export video from EyeTV... which, because I hadn't yet at that point learned to save the EyeTV version until the discs were actually burned and tested meant sitting through the videotape itself over again.
All pure trial and error. If a source file is bad or incompatible (as apparently happens fairly often, from what I've read) why not *say* "Encoding failed because [name of file causing trouble]..."?
The problem is far from being limited to iDVD, of course; it seems to me to be a general trend. I'm just using it as an example because it's had me stuck all day for what turns out to be its peculiar preference for Helvetica Nueue.
It seems like that notion has largely died out. Phone apps don't give anything at all; they just vanish without even an acknowledgement that anything happened. On the actual computer, entirely too often the message is "[desired activity] failed because an error occurred" or something equally useless. The last few days, I've been using iDVD to make discs out of old home videos. It's pretty good, for the most part, and I was sorry to hear it's been discontinued... but if there's anything it doesn't like about the contents of a disc, it tends to work fine in preview mode, then quit entirely during encoding.
When that happens, it could be caused by pretty much anything, and only extensive trial and error will determine what (if even that works.) The one I'm doing now, it seems to have been my choice of font for menu labels. Why that should matter, I don't know. Another disc, shortening the menu loop fixed it. Another, simply deleting the project and creating the *exact same disc* over again worked. Another, I had to go back and re-export video from EyeTV... which, because I hadn't yet at that point learned to save the EyeTV version until the discs were actually burned and tested meant sitting through the videotape itself over again.
All pure trial and error. If a source file is bad or incompatible (as apparently happens fairly often, from what I've read) why not *say* "Encoding failed because [name of file causing trouble]..."?
The problem is far from being limited to iDVD, of course; it seems to me to be a general trend. I'm just using it as an example because it's had me stuck all day for what turns out to be its peculiar preference for Helvetica Nueue.
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