FeedbackReporter – A General Purpose Feedback Panel

URL:  http://vafer.org/projects/feedbackreporter/

Code Quality: Production

Description:

FeedbackReporter is a basic feedback panel that you can use to allow your  users to send you feedback, bug reports, or even basic crash reports from inside your application which can then be captured on a back-end server.

FeedbackReporter is delivered as a Cocoa framework and a set of example php scripts that you can use on your support site to capture the feedback/reports your app sends.

FeedbackReporter can operate in any of several modes, it can:

• Act as a general purpose feedback panel which your users can activate to send in feature requests or general feedback about your application
• Act as a crash detector that activates the next time your application is run after crashing and gives the user the opportunity to tell you what they were doing when the app crashed
• Act as an exception reporter which will activate when your program generates an uncaught exception.  You provide the exception handler in your code and specify this function/method in your project’s Info.plist file and FeedbackReporter will use this function to set up the data to be sent back to your back-end server
• Act as a info gathering system as part of the feedback process; by providing a custom shell script you can have the panel send back arbitrary system information (of course this feature needs to be used with caution and full disclosure to your users — nothing is despised more by users than Spyware…)

The only thing that FeedbackReporter doesn’t do is full-blown crash-dump capture and reporting (i.e., sending a binary crash dump back to you that can be used to see where the crash happened inside gdb). Such a facility could implemented using the custom shell script options; but you would need to do a lot more work in order to make the crash dumps something that could be easily parse-able once you got them on your server. PLCrashReporter by Landon Fuller, which we cover in another article, is another open source project that can be used in conjunction with FeedbackReporter to accomplish this with almost no additional work other than linking in another framework.