Technical Support

If you have trouble with Interrogator, you can ask questions by email, or by fax:

tech support email tech support fax
techsupp with our domain + 1 < 650 > 964-1518 #11

We cannot guarantee a reply to your email, but we always try our best.

If you are reporting a bug, the two best ways you can help us fix the bug are:

1) Describe the bug to us so that we can repeat it on our machines. If we can replicate the phenomenon, we can usually fix it. If we cannot replicate it, we usually cannot fix it. If you cannot even reliably make it happen yourself, that's a very bad sign. (Of course, if nobody can ever make it happen ever, then it's not a bug.)

2) A crash report is extremely helpful, if the software crashed. On X11 platforms, any kind of traceback is useful to us. Just copy and paste the text directly into the body of an email. (Sometimes attachments condemn emails to the spam heap.)

We may try to communicate to you about the bug if we cannot make it happen the way you describe. A return email address that we can use to contact you is helpful. And, depending upon the bug or suggestion, we might want you to try out some early prototypes.

Regular, old 'communication failures' seem to happen a lot in practice with technical support. Sometimes, including a screen snapshot or two, showing what you mean, makes all the difference. On Mac OS X, you can use cmd shift 3, or use the Grab application (in Utilities). Linux usually has a program named Image Capture or something like that; often there are many programs you can put on your panel. Many general-purpose graphics editing programs can also take screen snapshots. We can understand almost all current graphics formats that a screen snapshot can come in including .pdf, .tiff, .png, .gif, .jpg, .bmp, and others.

The rest of this section describes various diagnostic techniques you can use yourself to try to narrow a problem down or to help us out by reporting important details to us. Much of this also works for other programs besides Interrogator.


Crash Reporting on Mac OS X

If Tactile Interrogator crashes ("unexpectedly quits" as some people say), you have most likely found a bug. You can help us out immensely by sending us a crash report.

Panther and later

The program tint has unexpectedly quit.


On Mac OS 10.3, a program that crashes will result in this small dialog, which says that the application has unexpectedly quit. If you click on the Submit Report... button, you get to the Crash Report dialog.

 crash report - send to Apple



Now, this is very important. Do NOT click on the Send to Apple button at the bottom! This button appears no matter where the software comes from; at any rate, it probably won't get to us.

Instead, copy out the text (click in the bottom box, type cmd A cmd C) and paste it into an email. Add to the email a description of what you were doing, if you can remember.

Send it to us at


All Mac OS X versions

Most versions of MacOS put the crash report in the file

    ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/tint.crash.log    

In fact you can copy this pathname right off of this page, and paste it directly into any window of Tint (while it's running correctly of course) to find it. That file tint.crash.log has a crash report for every time that Tint has crashed. (Specifically, for every program with an internal name tint, which is the internal name for Tactile Interrogator. We don't know of any others, so this is probably it.)

Console program icon


The log is maintained by the Console program. You can view all sorts of information there.



Startup Diagnostics

If Tint has trouble starting up, sometimes you can get some clues by starting it from the command line.

Mac: starting from command line

There are two ways to do this on Mac OS X.

The command open will open any file just like in the Finder.
(The part you type is in bold.)

durban ~ > cd /Applications
durban /Applications > ls

Calculator.app/               Preview.app/                  Utilities/
Chess.app/                    Safari.app/                   iMovie.app/
Image Capture.app/            Sherlock.app/                 iPhoto.app/
Internet Connect.app/         TextEdit.app/                 tint.app/

durban /Applications > open tint.app
durban /Applications > 

Getting closer to the metal, you can start up Interrogator the Unix way. It turns out that the main binary, deep inside, is a Unix executable, ready to run.

durban /Applications > 
durban /Applications > ./tint.app/Contents/MacOS/tint

               Tactile Interrogator (tm) release version 1.0.0.0

^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 ./tint.app/Contents/MacOS/tint
durban /Applications > bg
[1]+ ./tint.app/Contents/MacOS/tint &
durban /Applications > 
(You can type in that long pathname easily with something like this:
t i n t tab C tab M tab t tab
Tab fills in the rest of the characters usually. Those are Capital C and M.)

Unlike with the Open command, the Unix method does not come back immediately - your terminal is connected to the tint program, as if it's going to start prompting you for commands or data to type in. Of course this never happens with Tint, although it does produce some output.

If you type ^Z, as shown above, Interrogator stops and your terminal gets switched back to the shell. (Hold down ctrl, press Z.) Then the shell command bg (means 'background') resumes the program in the background as it should be. You can avoid this hassle by using an ampersand on the end of the command line, although this makes it harder to see error messages if you're still using the command line.

Starting up the program from the command line gives you a bit more insight if things are going wrong - just look for error messages.


Linux & Solaris: starting from command line

Simply type in the tint command at the command line if it's on your path. Or type in the complete pathname.

Many Unix gui systems throw away stdout and stdin when you launch a program with a Gui method, such as a browser or other file manager. This is actually a devastating flaw, as you can't see any error messages. Malfunctions will be that much more mysterious. Starting it on the command line allows you to see these messages. Starting it in Tint also displays the output on the inspector, although this doesn't work on Tint itself.

durban ~/bin> 
durban ~/bin> tint &

               Tactile Interrogator (tm) release version 1.0.0.0

durban ~/bin> 


Double Running

Interrogator can only run one instance of itself at one time. This is mostly to avoid confusion and to save system resources. If you start it up a second time, that second instance will eventually figure out that it is superfluous and will quit. This can be confusing if you have an instance already running, but hidden somehow, because every time you try to start up the software, it just quits.


Log File

Interrogator has its own log file, located inside the preferences directory, ~/.tint/log. This file lists error messages that are more subtle and don't demand the user's immediate attention, such as errors concerning the menu scripts and openers. It is especially useful when you are programming your own menu scripts.



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