Blog . Jiboneus

I know, and yes, I’ve read or heard that OSX the os itself do crash sometime, but in my 3 (or may be 4) years of using a Mac I had never experience such thing. Sure some application crash from time to time, but never the OS. OSX just keep going and going, rock solid for me. Until today that is.

It happen, today as I was doing my usual work, which means I ran a few hundred application (yes I’m exaggerating, it was only Textmate, Photoshop, Safari, and may be iTunes and some other stuff, I forgot). I notice that things starts to lag, some application are not responding. I then do what I normally do in cases like this. Start to close or ‘force quit’ any application that I’m not really using at that time.

Then ‘it’ happens. Suddenly my screen fades to black, not completely black, a semi-transperent black overlay, similar to the lightbox.js effect when viewing a image. There is a dialog box (which is actually an image) that politely asking me to restart my Mac in four different language (as seen in the picture). It wasn’t like any other dialog box this was different. I don’t know whether Apple got the idea from lightbox.js or the other way around, or maybe both of them are not related at all.

“You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button”

Restart and everything was back to normal. I later learned (went to Google of cause) that what happened was the OSX equivalent to what is famously known as the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ in the windows world. The right word for it in UNIX world is ‘kernel panic’, which is all fancy word that tells you your OS crashed.

It was my first time experiencing this. My experience in using Mac OSX has always been a pleasant one, even when it crashes. Trust Apple to make BSOD or OS crashed to be a pleasant as opposed to a somewhat scary experience.

Some might argue that having a some sort of a GUI for OS crashes might be overkill. It’s not informative enough. A real BSOD should include information about the stop code and arguments at the time of death. If the system knows which driver caused the crash it should tell you. A real BSOD should looked something like this :-

STOP: 0×0000008E (c0000005, bf875fc3, f07bcd48, 00000000)
KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

or this :-

If you are saying that, then you are not ready for the Mac.

Those information, the random number, which looked like someone slept on his keyboard and pressed some random keys, are only useful to experienced technicians, sysadmins or programmers. Apple developers actually put some thought in how to handle system panics, or crashes.

What would a normal mortal user can do with that information? The only information that a normal user would need to know is that it’s time to restart the computer.

Note on the language use on these messages. It just says “you have to restart the computer” not something like “there was a fatal exception error”. Fatal exception? That sounds serious, I must have broken the computer what do I do? That would be the response from a non-technical person when face with that message. Which is why there are some people that are just terrified of the computer.

Apple error message do not scare away it users. Also notice that when an application crashes in OSX the dialog box say that the program “quits unexpectedly”. There is nothing ‘fatal’ about it, just relaunch the application and everything would be fine. User friendly also means friendly error dialog boxes that doesn’t scare the users.

This whole thing just makes me love my Mac more!

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