During some development today, I had to install the scanner drivers for my HP 6110xi all-in-one device. Knowing that scanner drivers have been consistently horrible for the Mac, I decided against installing on my main machine (which also serves as my development machine) and instead installed it on one of my test machines. Well, it is really sad to be right in this case. The 101 MB download for the HP scanner included a whole lot of crappy software. As I was debugging my application, I write a bunch of stuff to the Console and as I was watching the Console, I saw lots of stuff like this:
2006-10-21 16:30:34.134 HPEventHandler[204]: DebugAssert: Third Party Client: (NULL != m_lock && 0 == errno) Can’t create semaphore lock[/Volumes/Development/HP/Mac-Sirani/mac-software/components/HPEventHandler/Sources/Core/HPTMNotificationManager.cpp:62]
appear, as well as debug statements showing the scanning process. I didn’t enable any special logging or anything like that. I wonder how much debug code shipped with the driver and bloated it? It really is a good idea to turn off the debug logging when you ship a product or at least turn if off and make it an option to turn it on in case you need to have a user send you something.
With the rush to get products out to market, quality has gone to the birds in a lot of products.