A lot of crashes

Hello all,

I´m using DTPO for a long time - no, or only minor, problems. Now with Yosemite on an MB Air a have crash after crash. Alway when previewing a PDF-Dokument. Has anyone similar problems or, even better, a hint or solution?

What version of the DEVONthink application are you using? If it’s not the current version 2.8.1, please update to it and see if the issue goes away.

Does this happen with all or many PDFs, or is it limited to certain ones? If the latter, please start a Support ticket, describe the issue and attach a sample PDF that causes the problem on your computer (preferably a relatively small PDF).

If you are on 2.8.1, there seem to be some issues with PDFs on Yosemite. (This release has not been Apple’s finest hour.) Hide thumbnails for the PDFs and it should stop crashing. We are looking into a fix.

I am on 2.8.1. and after having a close look to the console report I also share the opinion that it might be a Yosemite-issue. I´m going to try the “hide-thumbnail” hint and then look forward if there are still “crashings”.

I’ve reported the same problem. The thumbnail view (not my favorite one) workaround stops the crashing.

I didn’t know that Yosemite was so buggy. But, I guess that explains other issues I have encountered. I also had problems with the Yosemite beta, so it isn’t a huge surprise. I sure wish Apple would do better quality control. On the plus side, the update was free, it came just a year after the last one, and it has some nice features. I remember the days when I paid for buggy Apple OS updates :slight_smile:

I think this is part of the problem. I know Tim Cook wants to be on some “schedule” for releases but I would rather have the schedule be more flexible so QA is assured.

Some issues just do not get discovered before reaching a larger audience. I was on the Yosemite beta from the beginning, plus running DEVONthink betas, I have thumbnails turned on, and I have yet to encounter this problem. I suppose 1 million beta testers was not quite enough! :smiley:

Maybe Tim Cook opened up the beta to keep that schedule. iOS 8 was a little unpleasant for me. Just bad luck, I guess, because some other people report that everything was fine for them. I wouldn’t mind waiting longer for QA. I doubt it will happen, though.

Setting aside the messiness with the bugs, it looks to me like Apple handily outmaneuvered Google and Windows. The Nexus devices were announced to little fanfare a few hours before the iPad announcement, and then Apple shipped everything about a month before the Nexus stuff with Lollipop (the new OS update) was ready. Windows? No Surface Pro 4. Windows will let you try their next major update for free, but it is beta, and it won’t come out until next year. It must have been frustrating for the designers, engineers, and others on the teams at those two companies to see all of their work overshadowed and outpaced by Apple.

In other words, I expect Apple will continue pushing this strategy next year, because it is working well so far. Not good for us in the short term, but in the long term I suppose it means more Apple stuff in the hands of people, and so more potential DEVONthink users :slight_smile:

Flaky behavior can be hard to pin down.

I’ve viewed numerous PDFs since upgrading to Yosemite official release, with no problems at all (Three Panes view, or PDF in own window).

You should have my address on file somewhere. Can I expect your computer to arrive here by mail sometime this week? I hope so :slight_smile:

Judging by your comments in other threads, I think you probably have a lot more RAM than me, and that might explain the lack of crashes. I’ll have to start selling body parts to get a new MBPr with extra RAM in the future.

Until then, maybe I need to wipe my drive and install Yosemite fresh. That seemed to fix Mavericks problems last year. But, it is a pain, and I just wiped / reinstalled in August, so I’m not keen to do it again.

Sorry, my MacBook Pro retina isn’t up for donation at this time. :slight_smile:

Before doing a reinstallation of Yosemite, check out another possibility.

If you have installed Adobe’s Reader or Acrobat, Adobe installs PDF plugins in your user Library at ~/Library/Internet Plugins/. I always remove Adobe plugins, as they are not required to view PDFs under OS X and they have a history of causing problems.

I suspected as much :frowning:

No Adobe plugins for me, I am afraid. That would have been a nice, easy fix. I do have Acrobat Pro and Reader installed.

V2.8.2 will work around this issue of Yosemite.

Hi again,
disabling preview didn´t solve the problem, so I open a support request, I have some of the PDFs, these are mostly scanned files (black and white). The error is, as I can see, reproducable.

I’m TRYING to use Devon Think Pro 2.8.2 on an iMac, Yosemite operating system. When I select anything at all (folder or PDF) DTP crashes immediately. If I click on a menu, DTP crashes. I was told by support that if I closed the sidebar the problem would go away. However, I cannot even access the sidebar as, again, the program crashes. I rely heavily on DTP and am very disappointed that I cannot even use it. Please help.

Using thumbnail view helped me for a while. The recent update has been an improvement, but I am still seeing crashes. I sent in a support request with this information:

Hi. Using Yosemite with DTPO 2.8.2 the app is crashing with PDFs again. It appears to display the PDFs fine in the preview window, but it sometimes crashes when I attempt to zoom or manipulate it. At the moment, it is only happening with one PDF–a scanned document of about 5 pages or so (I cannot send it in this time).

This appears to be similar to the problem I reported for an earlier version of the app. On a side note, it would be nice if the app would save works in progress when it crashes. I had another text file open in another window and all the data in it disappeared.

It sounds very much like this might be related to my PDF problems as well.

Note that I do have Adobe Acrobat installed, but I removed all of its plug-ins after installation.