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.

Tiger compatibility to end.

After much thought on the matter, I've decided that the 1.8.x releases will be the last that will support Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. Whilst there is at least one more update in the works in the 1.8.x series, all new work (1.9 and beyond) will be done on a Leopard/Snow Leopard only codebase. There are several reasons for this but the main one is that I want to try and share as much code between the iPhone and the Mac as possible. This is everyone's interest as it means it will be easier for me to add features and keep both versions in sync.

Even after the move away from Tiger, I plan on keeping the latest 1.8.x version available to download on the website for some time and I will continue to support users using it as far as possible.

If you can though I'd update to Leopard/Snow Leopard.

BeerAlchemy Viewer is approved

Just had an email from Apple - they've now approved BeerAlchemy Viewer. It doesn't appear to be on the stores yet but should appear in the next few hours.

Just a reminder about what the app is (and isn't). It's a free app that syncs with BA on the Mac and lets you look at your recipes and inventory on the device. It doesn't do any sort of editing or creating of recipes - if you want to do that then you need to buy BeerAlchemy Touch.

Another rejection...

This time for BeerAlchemy Viewer. Can you guess which icon Apple's claiming as their own?



All those icons (except the app icon) are in BeerAlchemy Touch which has been approved TWICE. Obviously the app reviewer couldn't be bothered to tell me which one....again.

Dear Steve,

Thank you for submitting Beer Alchemy Viewer to the App Store. We've reviewed Beer Alchemy Viewer and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because of an Apple trademark image. We want to remind you of the importance of following Apple's posted Guidelines for Using Apple's Trademarks and Copyrights: .

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Beer Alchemy Viewer does not infringe on Apple trademarks, we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

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Apple Logo and Apple-owned Graphic Symbols:

You may not use the Apple Logo or any other Apple-owned graphic symbol, logo, or icon on or in connection with web sites, products, packaging, manuals, promotional/advertising materials, or for any other purpose except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Apple, such as a reseller agreement.

++++++++++++

For additional information regarding the image we are requesting that you remove, please refer to the attached screenshot.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program

A loaded question or two..

How many of you are still using Mac OS X Tiger (10.4)?

I don't actually collect stats on this other than from the crash reports that users send to me. From those it seems that the majority are on Leopard or Snow Leopard with 4% still on Tiger. This is from crash reports from the start of June. Is this representative?

Going forward I'd quite like to tidy up the internals of BeerAlchemy on the Mac using the new stuff from the iPhone. Having one code base makes it a lot easier to fix bugs once and maintain compatibility between the two. The iPhone code is also a lot more efficient and generally better written. Unfortunately using the iPhone code would mean killing Tiger support.

The other question is about PowerPC support. My guess is there's a lot more people using G5 and G4 machines than there are still using Tiger. Am I right? I should still be able build universal binaries after moving to the iPhone code so that is less of an issue right now.

I'm just toying with the idea at the moment but it's interesting to note that in xCode on Snow Leopard you have to specifically install the stuff to allow you to build for Tiger. My money's on it being removed completely on the next major xCode version (as well as support for universal binaries). When that happens I won't have a choice...

BeerAlchemy Touch 1.0.1 is out

...so that fixes the BeerXML upload bug.

I have 1.0.2 ready to go so that will be submitted later today. This fixes a bunch of other bugs and crashes.

I'm currently working on 1.1 which will roll much of the BrewMath functionality into BeerAlchemy Touch. BrewMath will however continue as a separate product for those that don't want or need BeerAlchemy Touch. There might be other stuff in 1.1 - it depends on how long Apple takes to approve 1.0.2 and on what I get done during the recovery from my op.

Irritating behavior in Safari

It seems that Safari on Snow Leopard seems keen on changing the file extensions on BeerAlchemy .bar files to either .xml or .bar.xml. It does this with the recipe files on the website and also files exported by BeerAlchemy Touch. Other browsers don't seem to do it and I'm pretty certain Safari on Leopard didn't either.

It's probably related to Snow Leopard's new fixation with file extensions and I'm not sure there's a way around it other than either using a different browser or renaming the files afterwards.

It's annoying though.