[OT] Great Bug Support

[Kay C Lan]

During a recent attempt to get Peter Brigham's Gutenberg Reader stack
working, one of it's files caused BBEdit to crash. I filled in the Crash
Report form that came up and received an auto reply within the minute.

Within 30 min I had an email from Rich from Bare Bones Support requiring
further info, and after playing around a bit I was able to produce a recipe
that would make BBEdit crash. So I sent off the recipe and naturally Rich
couldn't get BBEdit to crash without the file, so Peter gave permission for
the file to be forwarded to Rich.

As usual, for Rich BBEdit still didn't crash. Time to give up, just a single
user with a bizarre problem involving a single file. No, I was asked if I'd
be happy to participate in a little screen sharing exercise, even though the
timezone difference was huge and I knew this guy was well outside his work
hours. I said yes even though I was thinking that this was going to take
some time to set up to get around firewalls etc, but no, it was really easy
- and the reason for this post.

I then received from Rich an email with an invitation from here:

https://www.copilot.com/

Check it out, it truly is simple 'one click it works' and it's suppose to
support Win 2000+ and OS X 10.4+

The invitation had a link to download the required software, which is a VNC
server of some sort I suppose. The nice thing is, you the 'individual' have
the server, so are in control of when it runs, there is no chance someone
can look into your computer once you turn it off. It's 128-bit SSL encrypted
and will only work with the person sending the invitation, so relatively
secure.

Download the software, double click the software (OK so that's 3 clicks not
1) and within seconds my  cursor did a couple of laps of the screen which
indicated Rich was good to go - no set up, no preferences, no changed router
or firewall settings, just start the software and you're away!!!! :-)

I then went through the process of showing Rich how to crash BBEdit. Oh, and
I opened a TextEdit document where we exchanged messages - obviously iChat,
Adium, Skype etc could be used.

What was intriguing was all the things that Rich found interestng that I'd
have never reported. Seems like the time the document took to close, the
time dialog boxes came up all in relationship to Console messages were way
out of whack.

So, how many times do we read, it crashes for users X,Y & Z but it doesn't
crash for users A-W. How many times do you think 'watching what is
happening' would hone in faster than decoding the writings of someone who is
interpreting what they think your program is doing.

I notice Copilot has a Day Pass option for $5 and works for 24 hrs; and if
I'm reading it correctly, there is no restriction on how many people you
help in that 24 hrs - so if you have 50 people reporting it works, and 5 who
don't, you can invite all 5 to screen share for only $5!  Seems for small
software vendors with occasional requirements this could be money well
spent. Note also that either the 'helper' or the 'helpee' can pay - so if a
dozen List posts from Jacque still fail to get through my thick skull I
could 'invite' her to help me using Copilot, and I'd pay.

I have always used BBEdit as a software yardstick, mainly because I've never
needed Support, but now that I have, I've got to say I'm very, very
impressed!

(I've no affiliation, be it financial or otherwise, with copilot.com or Bare
Bones - other than a HAPPY user of their software)