Standing on the shoulders of giants... and hoping they see the problem! :-)

One of the truths of developing software, is that applications like Life Balance stand on the shoulders of giants, too, namely the application programming interfaces, software developer kits, libraries, compilers and all the various ways that we interact with the operating system. Every so often we notice something shaky under our feet.

This is what happened recently. We started to investigate a customer ticket, and we discovered a problem where values in a table created by our code were seemingly getting trashed by Apple's code. Uh oh!

When there are problems that lie outside the scope of our actual code, or in the grey area in between, we ALSO have to open a support ticket with the powers that be, in this case, Apple.

To do a good job of this is a matter of some pride. We want to be clear, concise without leaving out relevant details, and we want to not waste anyone's time. We often take great pains to isolate a problem, by writing sample applications that do very little other than point to the question that we're asking. This saves the engineer we're talking to some time, and instills confidence that we're all looking into the same unambiguous question.

We are using a technique that is documented to work, and we hope that we've made a mistake or misinterpreted the documentation, or something like that so that we can fix it quick.

If we're looking at an Apple bug (*gasp* yes, it does happen!), then, we have to do the next best thing, which is to find another way to achieve the same results. This can be okay too, but we still need help from Apple to figure out what to do.

This tends to be a very cheerful, enjoyable process for us. But it can take some back and forth in email.

We are in the middle of the back and forth as we start this week. So, I am quite hopeful that we will see further if the giants underfoot also put on their goggles!

Good to have everyone looking carefully at the situation, from all altitudes! :-)