Black Ink 1.6.7 is now available from the Black Ink home page, and is waiting for review by Apple on the Mac App Store.

A subtle usability issue that’s bothered me for years is Black Ink’s propensity to, in some instances, redraw the solved letters of a puzzle ever so slightly off from the previous location. This had the effect of causing some letters to appear to “jiggle” as you type in the answers for adjoining squares.

I finally figured out the cause of that problem, and fixed it along with a crashing bug affecting Touch Bar Macs, and a possible energy-saving change to prevent Black Ink using the unnecessarily powerful graphics card on some Macs:

• Fix a problem where puzzle grid answers could shift slightly while solving
• Add NSSupportsAutomaticGraphicsSwitching to Info.plist to depending on high power GPU
• Workaround a bug that could cause Black Ink to crash when waking a Touch Bar Mac from sleep

Happy solving!

MarsEdit 3.7.10 is now available from the MarsEdit home page, and will be submitted to Apple for update on the Mac App Store.

In MarsEdit 3.7.9 I fixed a few crashing bugs, and a side-effect of one fix was a new crashing bug that only affects users who have either just:

• Printed a MarsEdit document
• Edited a Tumblr “Chat” or “Quote” post.

I know, pretty weird, right?

Well, it’s fixed in 3.7.10. Enjoy!

Black Ink 1.6.6 is now available from the Black Ink home page, and is waiting for review by Apple on the Mac App Store.

This update fixes a few little bugs, and also changes the app’s behavior when the “Move to blank after changing words” preference is set.

The gist of this preference is when you have moved from one word to the next, it skips over letters in the newly selected word that have already been entered. This makes it easier to quickly type out the rest of an answer without having to re-type existing letters.

In Black Ink 1.6.5 and earlier, it would only jump to a blank entry in the next word if there was one, otherwise it would focus on the first letter of the completely filled answer.

Starting in Black Ink 1.6.6, if the next word is completely filled, it skips the entire word, focusing on the first blank entry in the next word down the line. So for example, in this image you can see where the focus has landed on the second space of 9-across, after typing “AIRS” in 1-across, and pressing the tab key:

Previously it would have landed on the first letter of 5-across.

I hope you enjoy this small change, as well as the other improvements in this version:

• Tabbing to a new word now skips completed words when “Move to Blank” preference is set
• Fix a crash that could occur when opening a damaged puzzle file
• Fix a UI glitch that caused multi-character entry focus ring to be wider on one side
• Eliminate some issues caused by entering single-character answer in multi-character entry mode

Let me know if you run into any problems!

FastScripts 2.6.11 is now available from the FastScripts home page, and is waiting for review by Apple on the Mac App Store.

FastScripts was affected by the same macOS bug that caused MarsEdit to sometimes crash when a Mac with Touch Bar is woken from sleep.

This update works around that crash, and also prevents the possibility that FastScripts (or a script run by it) could put a Mac into high-power GPU mode, affecting battery life.

• Workaround a bug that could cause FastScripts to crash when waking a Touch Bar Mac from sleep
• Add NSSupportsAutomaticGraphicsSwitching to Info.plist to avoid depending on high power GPU

Let me know if you run into any problems.