Black Ink for iOS 2.3 is now available on the App Store

This update is jam-packed with new features, usability improvements, and bug fixes. Two of the most fundamental changes to the app are the addition of support for viewing solving status, and for viewing puzzle notes, so I’ll describe those in a bit more detail.

Solving Status

Anybody who uses Black Ink regularly will be familiar with the process of going into the app, tapping your favorite puzzle source, and trying to determine whether there’s something new to solve. With no indication of what was new, or already solved, it could be a bit frustrating. But now, Black Ink will not only show you the date for each puzzle, but also whether you’ve started solving or completed it. Tap the round button in the upper-right corner to filter all the completed puzzles out of sight:

Puzzle Notes

This update also adds support for viewing puzzle notes, and hiding solved puzzles. Coming along for free with the “hiding solved puzzles” feature is an indicator in the puzzle list that shows whether a given puzzle is
e the ability to hide solved puzzles and view puzzle notes, but the update also includes all the following changes:

Everything Else

On top of those main user-facing features, there’s a long list of improvements, big and small that are included in this update:

• Redesigned “Actions” menu with standard menu interface
• Added a menu item for opening Settings to the Actions menu
• Clue text is now “Smartened” for prettier quotes, dashes, and ellipses (“”, ‘’, —, …)
• Puzzle notes can now be viewed when available for a puzzle
• Puzzle date and completion status are now shown along with the puzzle title
• Puzzle lists can be filtered to show only puzzles that have not been completed
• A progress indicator is now shown after clicking the download puzzle button
• Overlay images are now drawn on top of the puzzle grid contents and clue numbers
• Restored header and footer sections on printed pages
• Multi-character answers are now inset slightly more from the edge of the square
• Fixed a bug that could cause overlay images to draw outside the bounds of the puzzle grid
• Fixed a bug that caused special answer entry to sometimes fill adjacent squares
• Improved performance when loading a list with lots of puzzles
• Improved performance of puzzle printing

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

FastScripts 3.3.6 is now available on the FastScripts home page, or by selecting “Check for Update” from the FastScripts menu.

This update restores the menu bar icon’s progress indicator while launching, when processing the script folder’s scripts takes a longer-than-instantaneous amount of time. This behavior was standard in FastScripts for years and I inadvertently broke it in 2022, and neglected to notice until now!

This update also fixes a crashing bug that was introduced in version 3.3.5, which could affect users who deleted or renamed scripts while FastScripts was running.

Complete list of changes for this release:

• Restore display of the progress indicator in menu bar while launching
• Fix a crash that could occur while adding or removing scripts to the scripts folder

If you enjoy FastScripts, please consider spreading the word to your friends! Thanks for your support.

FastScripts 3.3.5 is now available on the FastScripts home page, or by selecting “Check for Update” from the FastScripts menu.

This update restores the functionality of live visual updates for long-running scripts, whose progress is conveyed in the FastScripts menu. This was broken in the previous release:

It also includes a bunch of other fixes, relatively great, and relatively small!

• Restore live updating of running script task progress information in the menu
• Fix a bug where long-running shell scripts were not properly terminated when canceled from the script menu
• Default environment variables are now passed to shell scripts for users who use zsh, bash, ksh, or fish
• Symlinks to shell scripts are now invoked directly so that the $0 variable points to the symlink and not the target
• Fix a hang that could occur if an alias to a large app is placed in the Scripts folder
• Prevent a crash that could occur while updating script running progress
• Fix a menu ordering issue with custom sorting tags that are non-UTF8 characters
• Fix a bug that caused scripts with certain unicode characters in the title to be treated as multiple scripts

If you enjoy FastScripts, please consider spreading the word to friends! Thanks for your support.

MarsEdit 5.3.2 is now available on the MarsEdit site and has been submitted to the Mac App Store.

This update fixes a couple crashing bugs that could occur when configuring a new blog in MarsEdit:

• Fix a crash that could occur when a bad URL is provided for a blog
• Fix a crash that could occur when adding a blog if auto-configuration failed

If you enjoy MarsEdit, please consider writing a review or rating the app on the Mac App Store, spreading the word on social media, or of course, by writing about the app on your own blog! Thanks for your support.