Black Ink 2.2.3 is now available on the Black Ink site and on the Mac App Store.

This update includes a number of improvements to the new calendar-based puzzle picker, addressing some bugs and also introducing a new behavior that highlights un-downloaded puzzles by showing their dates in bold:

This will make it easier to navigate historical puzzles without bothering to re-open puzzles that have previously been downloaded. Of course, if you do want to re-open a puzzle that is already downloaded, you can select it again from the calendar. In the future I hope to offer more details in this panel such that you can tell whether a downloaded puzzle is partially or fully completed.

Here is the complete list of changes for this release:

• Puzzle picker improvements
  • Undownloaded puzzle dates are now emphasized in the calendar
  • Fix an issue that sometimes prevented the latest puzzle being opened
  • Restore ability to press return in the Puzzle Chooser to open the selected puzzle
  • The puzzle picker calendar now stays in the same general timeframe across subsequent openings
  • If a valid puzzle is not found for a chosen date, the next available puzzle is now downloaded
• Puzzle appearance
  • Restore previous darkness of the puzzle highlight color in Dark Mode
  • More improvements to positioning of letters in puzzle cells
  • Reduced the spacing between clues in the clue lists
• General usability
  • New preference supports automatically closing window after solving a puzzle
  • Fix a rare issue that prevented special answers from being verified/corrected/revealed correctly
  • “Start Over” now clears any puzzle status flags as well as the entered answers

If you enjoy Black Ink, please consider writing a review or rating the app on the Mac App Store, and spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter! Thanks for your support.

Black Ink 2.2.2 is now available on the Black Ink site and has been submitted for approval on the Mac App Store.

This update is a quick fix to yesterday’s 2.2.1 update which addresses a crash that affected some users running macOS 11 or earlier.

Here is the complete list of changes for this release:

• Fix a crashing bug when opening NYT puzzles on some Macs
• Fix drawing of clue text with superscript and subscript characters

If you enjoy Black Ink, please consider writing a review or rating the app on the Mac App Store, and spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter! Thanks for your support.

Black Ink 2.2.1 is now available on the Black Ink page and the Mac App Store.

This update includes a variety of usability and appearance improvements:

• Color preferences can now be reset to default values
• Printed puzzles now include any formatting, e.g. italics, bold, that are specified for clues
• Puzzles based on east coast US timezone should now be available at the appropriate time in other time zones
• Fix a bug in 2.2 that caused kerning of text to be disabled in the clue lists
• Fix a bug that caused the app to sometimes become unresponsive while handling formatted clue text
• Fix auto-shrinking of clue font size to fit longer clues without clipping them
• Fix a variety of cosmetic glitches that affected older versions of macOS
• Fix a bug that prevented clues and grid numbers from being printed by default
• The puzzle timer no longer restarts automatically if a reopened puzzle is already solved
• Checking a puzzle that is complete and correct now re-displays completion panel

If you enjoy Black Ink, please consider writing a review or rating the app on the Mac App Store, and spreading the word on Facebook or Twitter! Thanks for your support.

Recently WordPress.com revised its pricing structure, switching from a complex variety of paid plans to a simpler approach in which users can either stick with a free plan, or pay $15/month for a variety of upgraded features.

Among the features now offered at the $15/month level are plugins and custom themes, which used to be included only with the more expensive “business” plans. This is a great change for users, but it exposes a huge number of WordPress.com users to an authentication issue that previously only affected the higher-cost plans.

The problem: WordPress.com’s implementation of the WordPress XMLRPC API doesn’t accept standard WordPress.com “Application Passwords” for these updated blogs. Application passwords are the unique, generated passwords that you must use for 3rd party apps such as MarsEdit when you have enabled Two-Step Authentication on a blog.

Luckily there is a workaround. It requires deliving into the legacy “WP-Admin” interface of the affected site, and generating san application password in the standard WordPress back-end, independently from WordPress.com’s own higher-level interface.

In light of the increased number of users who will be needing to figure negotiate this change, I updated the Red Sweater help pages to more fully document the process for generating application passwords, whether you’re on a free WordPress.com plan, or one of the newly unified paid plans. Read more here:

Red Sweater Help: WordPress.com Authentication

It would be great if WordPress.com fixed their XMLRPC API support so that standard WordPress.com application passwords worked on upgraded sites. It’s always been a little ironic that the user experience for paying WordPress.com users, in this one respect anyway, is worse than it is for those with free sites.