Scrawl Notes

My favorite bug reporter reported MORE BUGS. Bugs are bad, but finding them is good! Because then they can be squished. DIE, BUGS! If you typed an emoji (I would demonstrate here, but the App Store is apparently run by the No Fun Police, so I can't put emoji in the release notes), then the text after the emoji was this weird nerd font. How does that even happen? I don't know! I just forced it to be the regular font instead. Bugs are weird sometimes.

whaaaaaa? Two updates right in as many weeks? Turns out I actually still know how to make apps when I'm not dealing with syncing issues all the time. So, in that big giganto-release last year (20.0), I tweaked some of the styling to look better in dark mode. Turns out, it didn't look better if you scrolled. Looks fine until you have more than one page of text, which, I mean, that's too much text, come on. Just have less text. But alas, I can't control how much text people have in their notes (wait… yes I can. Hm.), so ultimately I was forced to just make it look nicer. The app now fades out text as it approaches the status bar so that you don't end up creating a peanut-butter-and-chocolate scenario with your notes and the current time. Also, the buttons now have a nice background so that it "floats" over text instead of letting text peek through. These new buttons work better with accessibility technologies like VoiceOver and Voice Control as well! Now the help button is called "Help" instead of the significantly-less-helpful "Button". Whoops. Enjoy!

whoo boy Okay, so the last version of Scrawl had a pretty nasty bug. I don't think it affected a huge number of people? But for those who it did, yeah, the app basically didn't work. Crashed immediately. It took a while to fix, and even longer to figure out how to make sure that I didn't ship an even worse bug. Or that it was actually even fixed. Or that there was really only one bug (there wasn't—there were two). Sigh. But I'm, like, pretty sure it's fixed now. I'm honestly pretty scared to ship this version. But I think it's better than the one before. I hope it is. Sorry.

Hey there, everyone. In case you've forgotten who I am, I'm Geoff, the dev who writes really dumb release notes. Also I make this app. Shoulda led with that one, probably. I totally spaced on updating this app for a few… years. I ended up releasing some other apps instead — check them out! Two out of three of them are good and also there’s Debigulator. And, in my defense, I was still updating Scrawl, I just kinda… kept those updates to myself. (Have y’all tried dark mode? It’s great.) Anywhose, I figured it was time to break that streak and actually ship something. Scrawl 20.0 includes: - Widget support for iOS 14 — place your notes on your home screen! - An Apple Watch app, so you can take your notes on the go. More on the go. On the wrist. - A share extension, making it easier to get notes into Scrawl in the first place. - Multiple window support on iPad, so you can edit your notes alongside multiple other apps. Or just edit the same text side-by-side, I don’t know your life. - A new, more-robust syncing system so things don’t get all busted so much. - Dark mode. Still kinda can’t believe I never shipped that. Hopefully, this is the return of more frequent updates. I imagine we’ll be seeing another one real soon, to support that thing it’s obvious this app should support. You know the one.

Story time! A long time ago in this very App Store, now lost to the mists of time, there was an app update. A very small app update to a very small app. Version 1.0.4 of Scrawl, the villagers called it. In that update, there was a feature. This feature was a pleasant feature. This feature helped the villagers, easing their neck pain by shortening the width of text on large devices. But hidden inside that feature was something lurking: a bug. And not just any bug. A user interface bug, who liked to hide text from the villagers. Now this bug, he was a clever bug. He knew that in order to continue his tricks, he had to hide from the app developer, who benevolently ruled the village and wouldn't stand for bugs disturbing his favorite villagers. So he hid somewhere the app developer wouldn't find him. He hid in the devices marked Plus, which the developer never used (#SEforlife). This bug, he likely spent time tricking a number of the villagers, hiding their text whenever they rotated their devices. But all the villagers stayed silent, not wanting to anger the bug further. But one day, the bug crossed the wrong person. A nameless hero discovered the bug's hiding spot and promptly wrote a letter to the developer, giving up all the secrets of the bug and his tricks. Immediately (well, three weeks later), the developer struck forth! The developer delved deep into the feature, found the evil bug, and booted him right out of the village! And then everyone lived happily ever after, probably. THE END

AN UPDATE TO OUR PRIVACY CAPABILITIES ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, everyone else was doing it. No, I'm not changing anything about what data Scrawl sends to my personal servers, third party advertisers, etc. That's the same as always: absolutely nothing. The only data Scrawl sends anywhere is storing your notes in your own iCloud account, if you have one. I can't look at that data, and neither can anyone else. But maybe you don't want *anything* out there. Or you're done with Scrawl and you don't want your old notes lingering in a warehouse somewhere. Or you want separate notes on separate devices. I get that. In Scrawl 1.2.4, you can disable iCloud sync, if you so choose. Deleting everything you've ever sent to iCloud is easy: just "Select All", and delete it. Then flip the "Sync to iCloud" switch and nothing goes there ever again. Well, at least until you flip the switch back. But, I mean… duh.

I once promised in these very release notes that I would never post a release that just said "bug fixes". But I really do only have bug fixes this time. They aren't even *interesting* bug fixes, like maybe we've had in the past, and I can't fill up a whole post about how maybe it won't duplicate text if you leave a blank line in your note anymore. So I'm just going to tell you a story about my commute. There's a kitten in the neighborhood that I see sometimes when I'm walking to the bus stop. I haven't seen it for several months, because it was winter and I guess it was staying inside where it's warm? Anyway, I saw it again today, and holy cow, it's so much bigger! It's a cat now! So, that was fun. It saw me and I guess it recognized me, because I walked by without talking to it, and it followed me and meowed at me until I acknowledged it. One time I was talking to the kitten (back when it was still a kitten), and a kid came out of a house and yelled at me for doing so. "Hey, that's my cat!" So I was hesitant to talk to the cat this time, but it was so insistent! So I turned around and asked it how it was doing, and then I took a picture of it to send to my office's #cats Slack channel. No one yelled at me. Oh, hey! This is version 1.2.3! That's pretty neat.

Bug fixes! Get your bug fixes here! In some cases, right when you're trying to edit your note, the cursor would jump to the very end. That's useful if that's where you want to type next, but REALLY FRICKIN' ANNOYING if it isn't. Which, considering you weren't already typing there… it's probably not where you wanted to type. Anyway, it doesn't do that any more. Today's update is courtesy of Scrawl user Jonathan Hansford, who was a great help tracking down this bug.

In the last update, one of the features I promised was background updating of the lock screen widget. That turned out to be less true than anticipated in real-world cases. This version makes that more true. In the last update, one of the features I promised was fun new bugs. That turned out to be more true than anticipated in real-world cases. This version makes that less true. Also in this issue: minor visual tweaks!

Here's one of those medium-sized updates I've been promising for a while: a complete overhaul of the syncing engine! YAY! …okay, that was less exciting than I'd hoped. What does this new syncing actually *DO*? 1. Background Updates: If you change your note on one device, the lock screen will update on all your other devices without having to re-launch the app. 2. Better Merging: Rather than always overwriting what your note says, changes will merge intelligently, avoiding the case where notes you've taken disappear unintentionally. 3. New Bugs: Hey, I didn't say it was *all* sunshine and roses. 4: Brighter Future: These new capabilities open up some pretty cool new doors… Also in this version: I fixed a bug where the iPad version would crash if you tried to open the share sheet. Whoops.