Our big update
We’ve been busy building new platform integrations, deploying huge backend updates, and rebuilding our font end site.
Named for the castle image we display lovingly on our new homepage, the Beginquest round of updates has been a big undertaking for us here at BugSplat.
After months of work we’re ready to announce we have four new integrations (Angular, Node.js, Electron, Unreal Engine), a veritable avalanche of backend updates, a sweet new site, and a brand makeover.
Important note for our users: there is some update info about our API in this blog post. Please scroll down and look for the segment labeled API or visit this page.
Checking in with BugSplat
For those who don’t know- BugSplat is a small software company based in Boulder, Colorado. We have team members located around the country, but the foothills of Boulder are home.
Although we’ve been around for a long time- first code being deployed in 2003- we very much run our ship like a startup.
For years we’ve been the go-to option for desktop crash reporting.
Our tool has helped thousands of developers track and fix bugs for millions of users around the globe. Companies like Riot Entertainment, Quicken, Atlassian, and Bethesda all trust us to help them fix their software.
You can get to know us a bit more on our about page.
New Platforms
With the Beginquest update we’re announcing compatibility with Angular, Node.js, Electron, and Unreal Engine. We’ve also revamped our support for Linux and will be adding Ionic support soon.
We’re excited about this because we think that it will 1) provide a lot of value to our current users and 2) hope that it will also open up several new channels for growth at BugSplat.
You can view all of our platforms by here.
Development updates
We have a new product updates page which you should keep an eye on for future releases.
We will also be announcing product updates via Twitter at @BugSplatco. You can follow us to stay up to date.
There have been lots of changes this year, if your team hasn’t updated its BugSplat library recently, you should consider an update for your next release.
The biggest recent change is that we now upload crash reports and symbol files directly to Amazon S3, rather than posting to our servers first. This improves both speed and reliability.
In connection with this change, we will be retiring support for our older versions of SendPdbs at the end of this year. All customers will need to update to a recent version (2.0.0.0 or greater) to keep symbol uploads working. Note that the new SendPdbs is compatible with all older BugSplat libraries. If you aren’t ready to link against a new BugSplat library yet, you can update SendPdbs by itself.
Note that Breakpad/Crashpad clients will still upload directly to our servers, since we don’t control the client API in that environment.
Another recent change, that might affect some customers, is that we have converted to a Unicode-only library. As a result, we’ve dropped the MBCS and C legacy interfaces.
This summer, we added LaunchCount and LaunchToLastCrashTime entries to Windows native XML files. We don’t yet report on these statistics, but that’s planned for the future.
Our .NET samples now use .NET 4.5. This allows us to provide an example for UnwatchedExceptions. You’ll find this new UnwatchedException test in myDotNetCrasher.
We’ve also added an option to allow larger crash upload limits. We used to have a hard cap at 2mb per upload, but now enterprise customers can choose options up to 10mb per upload. (There is an additional cost for this option.)
API update
Note that the recent web server update moved the bugsplat application pages from www.bugsplat.com to app.bugsplat.com. Customers that have used our web services interface will need to update their scripts.
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Keep an eye out for more around this change in the near future.
Website
For a few years now we’ve been using Wordpress to run our marketing site. It’s a fine tool which has largely served us well.
Wordpress is easy to use and it can look pretty good with relatively little effort.
One huge benefit for us was that our marketing and sales team could handle most of the web maintenance issues without having to bug the dev team.
Development is always busy building new features and supporting our users. The last think they want to do is futz with photo placement and publishing blog posts.
Despite this, we’ve grown as a company and the things that originally enticed about us about Wordpress no longer outweigh what we felt was holding us back.
Our new site is built on the Bootstrap framework, compiled using the task runner Gulp, and fully hosted on Amazon S3.
It more accurately fits and reflects the technology we have running our backend and crash reporting tool.
Brand
Each wave starts as a ripple. From a desire to slightly lighten up the colors on our ‘bug’, we developed a new color pallet which can be seen throughout our new site.
To download our brand assets, and to view the general guidelines about using our logo, please check out our new Brand page.
Graphics
One of the most fun parts of the Beginquest update was getting to again work with FireArt Studio.
FireArt has built us some really cool images in the past. Getting to spitball ideas with them was something I specifically looked forward to during this process.
I knew we wanted a moving image / .png sequence that was dynamic, playful, and visually represented that bugs were being defeated by crash reporting.
From that loose description we were able to hack together some ideas. Here are the two first sketches they delivered us.
One of FireArt’s great skills is taking ideas and moving them onto paper. We loved both ideas.
Ultimately the castle image won out. The team felt it better was a slightly better visual metaphor.
The final product looks like this. You can currently find it on our website where it is viewable as a png image sequence.
Looking forward
This has been an incredibly fun few months for us here at BugSplat. I’m really proud of the team for their dedication and hard work pulling together the Beginquest round of updates.
Keep an eye on this blog (we moved our blog to be fully hosted on Medium) and our Twitter account over the coming weeks for further updates.
