BeerAlchemy Mac 1.8.6

I just uploaded BeerAlchemy 1.8.6 for Mac. This release has only one change over 1.8.5 but it's a pretty important change.

For some reason, at some point, data corruption appears to be creeping into text fields in the app. What happens is that 'special characters' (e.g the degrees symbol, non-English characters) get corrupted and a large amount of invisible junk gets inserted into the files, every time the file is saved this junk grows until either BeerAlchemy gets too slow to use or the app simply can't load the file as it's too large (hundreds of megabytes)

What the new release does is check the length of any text fields. If they are over 10,000 characters long it replaces the entire text with a piece of placeholder text. I realize this could be seen as rather drastic but given the choice of losing some text or all your recipes I know which I'd choose...

Currently it seems that this problem occurs with text entered in the past (it hasn't been seen to happen with stuff entered after version 1.8.4). But it seems that once the corruption had started it would still continue to happen and get worse with newer versions. Hopefully, the changes I've made in the last few releases will catch the problem before it gets out of hand and eventually it will disappear altogether.

Text Problems

Somewhere along the line (I don't know where, how or why) problems seem to have crept in when 'special' characters are used in text in the app. This often seems to happen for the degrees symbol but others are affected. I have tried to fix this in the new release but might not have completely fixed it.

Can you please check this size of your ~/Library/Application Support/BeerAlchemy/Recipes.plist file? If it is greater than 10MB in size stop using the app and contact me at support at kentplacesoftware.com. If you catch it early enough it can be fixed.