Black Ink 1.6.1: Premium Puzzles

May 5th, 2014

Black Ink 1.6.1 is now available for download from the Black Ink home page and from the Mac App Store. This is a free update.

The big change in this release is addition of built-in support for downloading from two authenticated “premium” puzzle sources: The New York Times and the American Values Crossword. Black Ink does not offer subscription sales to these services, but for users who do have a subscription, Black Ink now supports entering your username and password to authorize automatic downloading of the source’s latest puzzle.

For a long time now many users have enjoyed direct downloads of the New York Times premium puzzle because of the happy coincidence that Black Ink and Safari could share the same web browser “cookies.” This meant that if you had logged in to your premium New York Times account via Safari, downloads of those puzzles (after configuring a custom puzzle source) would work automatically. That functionality was broken with Black Ink 1.6 as an unexpected side effect of security sandboxing: Black Ink can no longer access Safari’s cookies. With this update cookie sharing is no longer required for this functionality.

Complete list of changes:

  • New support for premium puzzle downloads from New York Times and American Values Club
  • Fix a bug where the puzzle chooser would appear upon launch even when already opening a document
  • Fix a crash that could sometimes occur while closing a puzzle

I hope these changes make Black Ink even more enjoyable for you puzzle lovers out there.