/Developer/Applications/Utilities/CrashReporterPrefs.app can make crash reports much more useful. It will show crash-reports for background processes, and stack-trace in the notification dialog.
Crash report-files are stored in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/
Unfortunately, crash reports are not sent back to third-party developers, even when you send them to Apple.
EDITED TO ADD: This still works in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.6)
Roughly, my triage order is:
* Data-loss bugs
* Unavoidable crashers
* Functionality-blocking bugs
* Avoidable crashers
* Avoidable bugs
* Misfeatures
* Performance issues
* Feature suggestions
* UI feedback
This is, of course, a rough ordering
I totally agree that data-loss / corruption is a higher priority then crashes. You can upgrade|downgrade a crashy program. But once data is gone, it is gone. Protecting users data should be your prime directive. I have always strongly disagreed with any bug triage that put crashes at spot #1.
As I have written before, the best way to convert a FourCharCode to an NSString* for NSLog()ing is to use the NSFileTypeForHFSTypeCode() function. But for the life of me I can’t remember that name, even though I use it about once a month. It’s too long, and it has too little to do with what I’m using it for.
So I have added the line:
#define FourCharCode2NSString(err) NSFileTypeForHFSTypeCode(err)
To my prefix-files, because I can remember FourCharCode2NSString().
UPDATE: (2008-08-06) There is an even easier way.
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