Good examples of dynamic error messaging?

Yesterday I came accross an interesting blog post describing the need for stronger user interface design for software error popups, they use apple as an example - thought i'd share:

http://bit.ly/9qBZLM

This got me thinking - could you build something like this dynamically to handle a variet开发者_StackOverflow社区y of exceptions / errors?

Any examples of other strong, existing user error messaging from a UX perspective?

I suppose such a system is possible (at least in theory). There are basically two problems it would have to overcome:

(1) When an error message box pops up saying "unknown" error, what it really means is "unexpected" error. Since the error is something the programmer did not expect, it's virtually impossible to do something intelligent at the point of failure.

(2) When an error occurs in a function, there's generally no way to infer the greater context in which the error took place. In the example you linked to, the author wants the application to tell the user that the "update" failed. The trouble is that the failing function had no idea that an update was in progress.

One of the commenters on that page suggested using a web service to look up detailed error and resolution information. I think this could work (you would have to pass it the error code and call stack), but it would require a large amount of development and maintenance effort. I think most software houses would decide that it's not worth the cost—especially when the unfriendly dialog gives the user enough information to search for a resolution.