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Comment by zbowling | Hacker News Reader

Everything crashing:

  - Skype (type and right mouse click)
  - Sparrow (type and wait)
  - Chrome (address bar)
  - Safari (address bar)
  - Tweetbot
  - Twitter.app 
  - Mac App Store (search bar)
  - Base (any textbox)
  - terminal (in the preferences screen)

Not crashing:

  - SublimeText

Pretty much each and every text box on the entire system.

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That's because SublimeText doesn't use NSTextFields, and therefore, doesn't use Data Detectors. It's not voodoo.

Seriously, people, learn how to read a backtrace. This is hacker news, not social-media-manager-who-claims-they-are-a-geek news.

Couldn't have said it better.

People act completely stupid when it comes to their OS. HOLY SHIT THERE'S A STANDARD TEXT FIELD CLASS?!?!?! APPLE IS DOOMZ0R3D!! Be a champ and submit these kind of things to your local devs and (as the super "hacker" posters say) carry on...

Oh, please. What is a standard text field class doing with the text inputted into it that would cause an entire app to crash? It's a ridiculous scenario.

Would you have the standard text field run in a separate process sandbox? Or not have standard widgets shared between apps? Or just try real hard to write code without bugs?

Uh, no - this is more of a "don't execute code in a textbox" thing.

Do you understand how the text box gets onto your screen?

Magick?

A great way around this would be for the system to ignore exceptions unless it was caught... wait nevermind

Great. Now, can you say who ever said that it was voodoo ?

I only see someone who said that it was safe to type it in a software, but I can be wrong.

> can you say who ever said that it was voodoo

Listing every single app under the sun when it's completely obvious a common and widely used component (doesn't matter what's its name so really no need to know Cocoa and that it's probably NSTextView) is used is acknowledging it as voodoo.

No. It's being curious as to what you might be able to do with it. In my case, bricking Messages.app until they send themselves lots of messages.

Voodoo is in your mind, perhaps, but not those who found it interesting which apps use NSTextView and which don't.

Right now, Sublime seems to be the only one. Anyone care to try TextMate?

You mean this isn't Slashdot?

The likelihood of python/ruby/PHP/etc. programmer being able to interpret a native code stack trace is... what? Probably quite low. They might not even know what the function call names imply. And yet they'd fit perfectly in to this site's readership.

I'm not a social media manager. I'm an engineer. I was making list from casual testing and giggling.

I don't think the poster implied anything else.

Add Messages.app to that list, I discovered as I stupidly tried to explain how to repro it to someone..

The fun thing about having it in messages.app, is it is actually a bug on the RECEIVING end of messages.app. And I can't seem to delete the message before the app crashes again.

I'm so happy I have nice friends.

Disable your spell checker and it will stop crashing. Then you can delete the message, and re-enable the spell checker.

Why would the spell checker be running against in-coming messages? So that you can be a grammar pedant and annoy your friends?

My guess would be that data detectors are used to detect and format links in incoming messages.

Then why would disabling Spellchecking affect that?

This did not fix it for me. Turned off spell checker and text substitution. Have another solution?

This will remove any messages from your iMessage database that contain %File:% (% is a wildcard):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Messages/chat.db "delete from message where text like "%File:%"

I dare not try it, but having that text as status on Facebook could crash those viewing my status using Safaris?

No, you have it in the page just fine. It is only when it is in an NSTextField that it becomes an issue.

This bug is even crashing the crash reporter app as well. It vanishes shortly after appearing when I reproduce the bug in TextEdit.

Typing "File:///" in these also cause a crash:

Spotlight.

Find field in chrome.

Sublime Text will crash if you type File:/// into the help textbox in the help menu.

(This is true of basically every OSX app there is)

That because menu and help search are OS X functions.

Typing it into a text box in Safari causes Safari to hang completely. Had to force quite it.

Add Finder to the list. It dies if you try adding it to one of the color label names.

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