Well, we thought we had gotten them out, but history and logic should have shown us that bugs never die completely.

Several gracious iCAR 0.6 users have pointed out that it still displays a crashing bug in some cases when a new-message window needs to be opened. This bug varied hugely in intensity between people with seemingly similar setups.

Dutiful user Seth narrowed this down a great degree — it appears that these crashes manifested only when he had turned on spoken notifications of new messages.

This jives well with some earlier discoveries I’d made when the iChat AV beta first displayed this particular kind of bug, prompting a complete reorganization of part of iCAR. It appears that iChat really doesn’t like to send messages before a “chat” (which is really just an exchange of messages) has been accepted. I haven’t been able to be any more specific than that, mostly because of the mystery inherent in writing patches for closed-source apps.

The previous solution to this problem had been a miniscule delay between receipt of an incoming message and sending of an outgoing one. I think the course of action at this point, though, may be to attempt to find a trigger within iChat that will indicate when a reply can be safely sent.

It is at this point in this entry that I begin to wonder why in the world I am blogging this. Oh, world.

In any case, that’s where I am in iCAR 0.7’s development, and that’s where I’ll remain until the proverbial bovines return to their place of domicile.