Crash Catch

Version 2.1.1 has been published of Crash Catch's Flutter crash reporting library. It fixes issues where it was deemed legacy as it didn't support null type safety but also adds support for sending crashes via Windows Desktop projects and web projects. This brings the full list of supported platforms for the flutter library to Android, iOS, Windows and Web.

I made some improvements to the dashboard particularly around smaller laptop screens (such as 13" Macbook) where the navigation header and some of the toggle buttons were squished together, so layout around this area has been improved.

I also noticed that performance could get a tad slow at times with large amount of data under the account so made some improvements in this area as well, mostly due to a missing index on the database table.

And finally, implemented a new subscription plan offering 1M crash reports a month with 12 months data retention.

More information can be found on the blog post https://blog.devso.io/improved-dashboard-and-pro-plan-subscription-for-crash-catch/ or you can sign up for 50% off at https://crashcatch.com

Its been months in the making but over the last day or so I've completed the migration of the backend of Crash Catch. I did a blog post explaining the changes which can be found at https://blog.boardiesitsolutions.com/crash-catch-backend-rewrite-release/ if you are interested.

The main reason though was when I first started working on there was no cross platform code (at least that I knew) so the crash processing was done in C++ and at the time, I only knew vanilla PHP, this made adding features and improvements cumbersome to complete.

Since I started Crash Catch .Net Core has become more mainstream and stable enough that I felt now was the right time it could be used (I did know C# previously but didn't felt .Net Core was to knew to attempt using it). I also recently learnt Laravel (a PHP framework) which I used for a couple of other smaller projects and instantly found it much easier to manage the code and implement features as it scaffolds a lot of stuff for you automatically which had to be done manually with Vanilla PHP, such as creating data models as an example.

So after the past few months I've been converting the web API to Laravel and the crash submission engine in C# .Net Core and installed this on shiny new VMs (digital ocean droplets) on Rocky Linux to remove the soon to become end of life CentOS 7 servers that were originally in use.

With the changes also came some frontend improvements such as significant performance improvements, no longer aggressive form validation and an improve account and billing page.

The docs site is also improved, this used to be a static site which was a pain when it came to adding new features to Crash Catch as I had to build and release a new version of the site everytime. I've now made it dynamic so I can add help pages dynamically without having to re-release the website each time which is a significant time improvement. This was done in NextJS, another thing that I've learnt recently.

While doing the backend rewrite, I got my first customer as well, not sure how they found Crash Catch as I wasn't really pushing it that much but part of the rewrite changes the crash submission API from form-url-encoded post data to JSON so had to create a little API proxy script which I did in Python that receives the request from old Crash Catch libraries the customer was using, and checks if its in the old format, and adapts the HTTP headers and the POST data to fit in with the new backend system so everything is backward compatible until the customer gets their projects updated to the new library.

Hopefully next year I'll be able to push and market Crash Catch a bit more (something else I need to learn) and get some more customers and I can't wait to keep pushing Crash Catch forward.

If you want to give a try you can signup at https://crashcatch.com and if you have any feedback or questions, I'd be happy to help.

Thanks
Chris

Made available on GitHub and on pub.dev (the flutter package manager) an official Flutter library for Crash Catch to submit handled and unhandled crash and error reports to Crash Catch from your Flutter Android and Flutter iOS projects.

Not long after releasing this I then found out that Flutter Web became a thing so hopefully will be able to tweak the package so that it can run on mobile and web platforms.

Its finally happened, but today is the day I've felt comfortable (ish) opening up signups to beta test Crash Catch.

Currently supports the following project types officially (but you can submit custom crashes for currently non supported platforms):

• Android
• ReactJS
• PHP

There are many more to come but I want to get some feedback first. I've been using it for a while on an Android app, but proved it definitely works today as integrated the ReactJS library into my status pages and Crash Catch reported a fault that I didn't know about (it would throw an error in javascript (although wasn't visibly anything wrong when looking at the page) so that was good to see.

Anyone who signs up gets an automatic 50% off the lifetime you keep the subscription.

Any feedback or questions you have good or bad would be much appreciated. My email and twitter is on my profile as that's probably the easiest way.

I've had the domain crash catch for a while, but I just put a very quick temporary page up - it didn't really have any info and it didn't display properly on mobile.

Finally, I managed to find some time to do a more proper version of the landing page, which shows some of the information of what Crash Catch is, with some screenshots. This will gradually evolve as the project develops and I can include more info and screenshots.

Let me know what you think.

Bought the domain crashcatch.com and set up a landing page to sign up interests. At the moment not expecting to get much in the way of signups as there's no details or screenshots as yet but literally just started so that's to come :).

Next steps is to start the project and plan out the UI. Need to think of ways or driving more traffic during the development, thinking of blogging the development and maybe trying streaming to get out there a bit more and gain a bit more trust instead of being person behind the computer, but need to think about if streaming is suitable and if so what and when.