Black Ink 2.1.8 is now available on the Black Ink site and has been submitted to the Mac App Store. This update fixes a problem in which some New York Times puzzles with circled squares did not appear correctly. If you already downloaded a puzzle such as today’s September 12 puzzle, you can delete the […]

Black Ink 2.1.7 is now available on the Black Ink site and on the Mac App Store. Last week, the New York Times shocked the crossword community by announcing that they would drop support for the Across Lite download format in just one week. What a week it’s been! As I write this on Tuesday […]

Black Ink 2.1.5 is now available on the Black Ink site and on the Mac App Store. This update addresses a long-standing shortcoming of the app that prevented puzzles in the Across Lite (.puz) format from being openable in Across Lite, or other apps that open such puzzles but verify the internal “checksum” values in […]

Shortly after Apple announced the availability of a public SDK for building iPhone apps, I got to work porting Black Ink, the beloved Mac-based crossword-solving app, to the phone. Here is the first source code commit comment from April, 2008: changeset: 340:1c1230530532 user: daniel date: Sun Apr 06 23:29:07 2008 +0000 summary: Very first building […]