Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uwm.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!snow.Berkeley.EDU!vater
From: vater@snow.Berkeley.EDU (Rob Vaterlaus)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Open Letter to an After Dark User
Message-ID: <41510@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 31 Mar 91 22:04:28 GMT
References: <3661@ux.acs.umn.edu>
Sender: nobody@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: vater@snow.Berkeley.EDU (Rob Vaterlaus)
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 48

In article <3661@ux.acs.umn.edu> oleary@ux.acs.umn.edu (Doc O'Leary) writes:
>I've found what I believe is a bug in After Dark 2.0 ("AD").
>
>I was 3+ pages into a Word document when, in an attempt to use hierDA's
>pop-up menu by clicking on the desktop in the lower left hand corner, I
>had the system crash on me, losing my work.  Macsbugs reported an
>Address Error "PutScrap +27E"
>
>Go ahead and try it.  Just click the mouse in your no-sleep corner a few
>times (it will take fewer, like one or so :-(, in MS products) in quick
>succession (unless you can time the minus sign well).  Oh, don't do this if
>you have any important work you haven't saved recently.

I did try it and your are right!  This a bug that we did not know about and
you are the first person to find it.  I tried to get it to happen in other
programs but the only one it would happen in is MS Word 3.0 and 4.0.  I tried
about 30 of the most popular programs.  Has this happened in other programs?

>I kind of expected a little more from the second version of "The Ultimate
>Screen Saver"  I've reverted to using Moire for the time being.  If this is
>a know bug, and I have just wasted bandwidth, feel free to either flame-mail
>me or, preferably, send me a fix.  If there is no fix, I'm going to have to
>return AD, as I cannot predict when I may happen to click in the no-sleep
>corner (e.g., playing an important game during a video download ;-).

I am sorry that you lost your work.  We try very hard to make sure our
software is bug free.  Because we are "just a screen saver" we often have to
work around bugs in other programs to get AD to work correctly.  This bug is
pretty obscure (though obviously fatal) given that no one has found it after
8 months of use by tens of thousands of users.  The good thing is that it is
repeatable and it should not be too hard to fix.

>BTW, Fish! locks my SE up after irregular intervals.  Does anybody else have
>this problem?

Do you have AD 2.0t?  There was a bug in Fish! that caused it to randomly
crash on the Plus, SE, and Classic.  It is fixed in AD 2.0t.

Please give me a call at work (415) 540-5535 or send me your phone #.  I can
arrange to send you AD 2.0t and talk to about the cursor bug.

Bruce Burkhalter
Berkeley Systems, Inc.

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