The success of Black Ink on the Mac App Store has motivated me to get busy working on a number of improvements I have been planning for some time but just hadn’t found time to do.

The big deal in 1.3 is that I added support for a different format of puzzle that opens up Black Ink to a number of new sources for more solving fun.

Because I don’t have a strong, established beta testing group for Black Ink, I’m opening this up as a public beta to get any bugs ironed out before it goes public for the Mac App Store and direct-purchase customers. If you’d like to test out, just download and give it a spin!

Download Black Ink 1.3b1

Be sure to drop me a line if you run into any problems, but also if you are interested in being part of a more permanent Black Ink beta testing group. I’m going to try to get organized for future, private testing rounds.

A round-up of the changes to expect in this release:

Black Ink 1.3b1

• New web puzzle sources
  • LA Times Daily & Sunday
  • Newsday
  • USA Today
  • Universal
• Rework the Startup preferences to be more user-friendly with reopening puzzles
• Give keyboard shortcut Cmd-K to “Check Current Letter”
• Now includes automatic crash reporter
• Fix a bug that caused Black Ink to hang when printing on rare occasions
• Fix a bug that caused puzzle timer to be placed off screen edge
• Fix a bug that could prevent puzzle solving menu items from being enabled
• Fix a bug that prevented canceling a stalled puzzle download from working

Known Issues

• Encoding issues with Newsday 2/4/11 characters
• Documentation not updated to reflect reworked startup preferences
• Puzzle icons in startup window get smaller if window closed and reopened
• Newsday, USA Today, and Universal have generic icons for now

Enjoy!

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