As a general rule, barring a bug I'm not aware of yet, the parser should not crash on malformed packets. In this case, it was just too verbose in logging the error. The parser already runs in a separate thread. In fact, each connection has its own thread. Because of this, I have the logger framework set up to report anything logged at the "error" level as a notification to the user; all other levels just get sent to the log file. The place where this error originated from, though, was while it was re-reading packets from the database and should have been logging at a level lower than error. Any incoming malformed packet should get dropped before it ever makes it to the database. This was an unique case because the packet did not originate from an external source, but rather it was a packet that QTH created. The assumption is that QTH should never generate a malformed packet. But of course, there's always the chance for a bug, which this was. That's what this beta test is for - to squash the bugs.
With regards to a wizard, there are already places to configure all the necessary configuration in the Preferences and there's a help article that describes station setup, but I'm wondering if I need to be a bit more "in your face" about it and present a wizard to help walk through it. In YAAC terms, Andrew has both a "configuration wizard" and an "expert config", What I have right now is akin to the "expert config".
You don't tend to see a lot of "wizards" in the Mac world. Some things, like when installing macOS itself, do have them. When you're installing the OS for the first time, you're prompted for things like WiFi settings and iCloud credentials. But other things, even something as complex as iMovie, just dumps you into the user interface and you're expected to either know what you're doing or muddle your way through it.
This is the discovery process - I'm learning how people (who aren't me) discover how to use an app like this. Things that seem intuitive to me, may be absolutely opaque to others. In general, I will likely take some cues from Mail.app; this is an example of an Apple app that you basically can't do much with unless you first fill in a few (sometimes technical) details.
I'm tempted to default the symbol to /M, which is the Apple logo that was originally used for MacAPRS. I don't imagine there are very many people running MacAPRS anymore.
- Wes, W8WJB