Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Noodlings » Antisocial Software:

A while back, I got a report from a customer that Hazel was not working. Looking at the logs, the customer noticed that it would stop working whenever he ran Logic Pro. When he quit Logic, Hazel would magically work again. At first, I didn’t believe it. It seemed too weird but I downloaded a trial of Logic Express and sure enough, I experienced the exact same behavior. After a bit of poking around I discovered what was happening. Logic Pro/Express stops all launchd jobs. Hazel uses launchd to start its background processes so it was a bit disconcerting to see another program, especially one from Apple, disabling yours on purpose, albeit indirectly. At least Logic is nice enough to start the jobs again when it quits.

Now, I’m sure the Logic team is probably doing this to ensure a level of performance but scouring the Apple lists and the web at large turned up nothing about this behavior. Maybe a tech note somewhere would have been nice. It’s unclear if any of Apple’s other pro apps exhibit this behavior but at least now I know what to look for.

10:05 AM