Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it will do so at the worst possible point in time. (Murphy’ Law – more or less)
After Notebooks 7.2 had been finalized, tested and was waiting for review at Apple, everything seemed set for the trip abroad, booked long ago. We had no idea that a case of Murphy’s Law was waiting around the corner…
It turned out that iOS 8 and the subsequent update to iOS 8.0.2 caused unexpected troubles, and being abroad with no regular internet connection, we had not chance to react in time. Many of you have experienced issues (see below), tried to contact us by email, on helpify or via our blog and had to wait much longer than usual to get a response. Actually, some of you are still waiting to hear back from us.
Despite the backlog of email we decided to give priority to fixing the issues, and today we sent an update to Apple for review. So if all goes well, you should have Notebooks 7.2.1 in your hands within the next couple of days.
Here is a summary of known issues and their current state:
- Strange scrolling behavior when editing formatted documents: fixed in Notebooks 7.2.1
- Prev/Next in search results does not work correctly: fixed in Notebooks 7.2.1
- Protected items do not display: this is caused by the new caching mechanism we introduced in Notebooks 7.2. You can quickly fix that yourself by deactivating caching in Notebooks’ settings > general, but in Notebooks 7.2.1 we will temporarily disable caching until it works more reliably.
- Printing not possible on iOS 8: fixed in Notebooks 7.2.1
- No timestamps and inserting images on iOS 7: fixed in Notebooks 7.2.1
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It seems that the crashing issue (when launching Notebooks or when opening a file) is related to the selected time format. Changing that to 24 hours in iOS settings solves that. – We are working on a permanent solution.
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(Notebooks 7.2.1 was released Oct 20)
Any plans to support iCloud Drive?
Yes, we are planning that.
(We have been testing iCloud sync for more than 2 years, but it has never been as reliable as Dropbox. That is why we have not yet made it available to the public.)
Brilliant – dropbox is great, but I have more storage on iCloud Drive, as I think most will soon due to more storage options. So it will be great if notebooks can integrate iCloud Drive.
Any plans to have the document picker as an import option? That would be great too.
We have not yet started working on it, but it’s on our list.
Unable to Read Document – An error occurred while reading the document.
It seems that yesterday’s update to Dropbox has rendered Notebooks 7.1.1 for iPhone unable to read RTF documents. A change in iOS 8 made Dropbox unable to preview RTF docs. So after several weeks Dropbox finally released an update that fixed their RTF issue, but apparently created a new issues for Notebooks (iPhone). It’s probably too much coincidence that NB stopped reading RTFa at the same time that DB fixed their issue. RTF is the reason I am using Notebooks.
Also, for some reason any file of the type .rtfd (contains an image) is interpreted by the iPhone app to be a Book rather than a document, and therefore sorted separately from the .rtf files. The app is also not able to read the text in these files, although it does display the images.
Are you aware of the issues? Can we expect a fix soon?
Thanks-
Hi John,
that whole “problem” started with iOS 8, as you already pointed out. iOS used to know how to handle and display RTF and RTFD documents, but for some reason, it no longer does. Our hope is that Apple will restore that in iOS 8.0.3.
RTFD documents always had to be handled a little differently on iOS; actually, you need to zip them (which makes them end in .rtfd.zip), and iOS will correctly display them.
A few hours ago, Notebooks 7.2.1 for iPhone was released; just give that a try and see if the Dropbox change is now compatible; if not, we will try to take care of that in Notebooks 7.2.2
Best,
Alfons
For that reason I am requesting that you contact me as I have requested a refund from the App Store
iOS 8.1 is able to correctly display RTF documents again.
One day is not much time to go from highlighting a refund to demanding a refund. Have some patience, as frustrating as iOS 8 is for us users I’m sure it’s more so for developers.
The update works great. Thanks.
I regret to report that the new version 7.2.1 does not fix the crashing problem on my iPhone 6 Plus. It crashes as soon as I try to create or open a note.
Have upgraded to IOS 8.1 but still the same. It is fine on my iPad.
John
Ho. Same problem. Updated to ios8.1 on the iPhone and the app crashes the minute I try to open any of then preinstalled documents. Really need a fix on this soon to access my notes and class stuff.
Hi David,
what makes it so hard to track down and fix this issue is that shows up randomly on iPhones and iPads; for some users the iPad is ok, the iPhone is not, or vice versa. Many users don’t have this issue at all, and we are unable to reproduce it on any of our devices. As it seems, the crash is related to some change in iOS 8, but not to our code directly. – We are trying to fix this issue as quickly as we can.
Alfons I have discovered how to fix this problem. I don’t know how this even works but it does. I changed my time format to 24 hour format to speed up my phone as it was gone very slow since I updated to iOS 8.1. I did this with previous versions of update too and it always speeded up my phone. After switching to the 24 hour format all of a sudden I can now open documents in notebooks in 7.2.1. I wonder if those who did not have any issues with your update already had their phones set to 24 hour format? Hope this helps others with problems. Please let me know. David.
David, I don’t know how we can thank you, I guess we could have searched for that forever!
We don’t yet understand why the date format leads to a crash, but obviously iOS 8 reports the date/time in a different, non-standard format. We will further investigate…
Thanks again!
Thank you D Duff , finally have my work back
I can confirm David’s findings. 24 hour time format fixes the issue for me.
John
I’d say that is the solution for most if not all users of notebooks. Glad to have got a solution to this issue. David.
I’m running iOS8.1 in my iPhone 6, and I haven’t experienced this issue at all. The program also runs fine in my iPad Air (8.1). So, it might be restricted to some folks with certain configurations – not universal. I’m glad that this does fix for those folks though.