Affinity Designer Crashing iMac

[mmwestsussex]

Using 1.8.4 from App Store, everytime I try to save a file, and various times when I've been adjusting a file (adjusting image, making text into curves, relocating an image, editing text) Affinity Designer has caused my whole iMac to shutdown and restart without warning. 

I've closed all other Apps and I have a iMac 5k 27 inch 2020 with 3.8ghx i7 8 core, 64gb of RAM & AMD Radeon Pro 8GB graphics - it's not the capacity of the machine causing the crash! 

 

[Dan C]

Hi @mmwestsussex,

Welcome to the forums and I'm very sorry to hear you're having trouble!

I'm going to require a copy of your crash report(s), so we can investigate this further for you.

Please go to Applications > Utilities and open the Console app. Crash Reports from our apps can be found in the User Reports section. You can Right Click the required Crash Report and select Reveal in Finder, then attach a copy of the 3 latest reports here.

Many thanks in advance 

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, Dan C said:

I'm going to require a copy of your crash report(s), so we can investigate this further for you.

Please go to Applications > Utilities and open the Console app. Crash Reports from our apps can be found in the User Reports section

As explained here, finding a crash report for a kernel panic (to my knowledge the only type of crash that can cause a Mac to shutdown and restart without warning) no longer works in the usual way in Catalina. If the OP is using a 2020 5k iMac, presumably that Mac is running Catalina, like I am on my own 2020 5k iMac.

I have had exactly one kernel panic on mine (from what I can tell unrelated to any Affinity app because it occurred when no Affinity app was running), but even immediately after it restarted, I could not find any log report related to it (no file with "Kernel" in its name or with a *.panic extension) anywhere on my iMac.

In fact, Console.app in Catalina does not seem to have a "User Reports" section as such, so I wonder if there is anything you can suggest about where to find crash reports, whether related to any of the Affinity apps or not, on Macs running Catalina.

[Dan C]

58 minutes ago, R C-R said:

In fact, Console.app in Catalina does not seem to have a "User Reports" section as such, so I wonder if there is anything you can suggest about where to find crash reports, whether related to any of the Affinity apps or not, on Macs running Catalina.

Thanks for letting me know, that wasn't something I was aware of

From what I understand of my research, 'User Reports' is now the 'Crash Reports' section of the console app. I have seen both Affinity related and Kernel Panic crash reports in this folder - that is, on an older OS under the 'User Reports' category - so I would expect them to always be found here.

I have however found some contradictory information online, which I'm unsure how truthful this is, but some users report finding kernel panic logs under the 'Diagnostics Reports' tab - so perhaps it depends on what part of the system/hardware caused the panic?

Equally, as far as I'm aware, almost all log files can also be found under Library > Logs > DiagnosticsReports. I hope this clears things up!

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Dan C said:

From what I understand of my research, 'User Reports' is now the 'Crash Reports' section of the console app.

That is where I expected to find crash reports as well, but even though I have had a few apps crash since I started using this 2020 iMac,  when I checked the Crash Reports section of Console.app, I found just 2 items related to crashes, neither of which referenced crashes of any of those apps.

I just now found in Diagnostics Reports 2 files related to Affinity Photo v1.8.4 wakeup events, neither of which was there at the time I wrote my previous reply, & neither of which is a crash report (both have the file extension .diag).

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

Equally, as far as I'm aware, almost all log files can also be found under Library > Logs > DiagnosticsReports.

Both of the above wakeup event Diagnostics Reports items are in Library/Logs/DiagnosticsReports. One of the two crash report items (the only two with a .crash extension anywhere on my iMac) is in Library/Logs/DiagnosticsReports. The other is in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticsReports (the Library folder in my user account's home folder).

With the "Kind" column enabled in Console.app, all 3 Diagnostics Report items show "System" in that column; the one in my user account folder shows "User" there, so for Catalina users it is probably worth looking in both places for crash reports.

For completeness (but probably not relevant here) I will add that after posting my first reply to this topic & before posting this one I ran Apple Diagnostics & Disk Utility's First Aid on my iMac, neither of which showed anything amiss with my iMac. I also reinstalled Catalina (via the Shift-Option-Command-R restart method), which at least in theory retained all my files & user settings.