Catchup v.1.0.1 & v.1.0.2

Screen Shot 2014-08-07 at 2.46.50 PMHere are the release notes for Catchup version 1.0.1, which was approved and went live in the App Store sometime late last Saturday night (September 6th).

v.1.0.1
* added a setting to let you change who goes first in a vs AI game
* minor changes to text strings, mostly consistent capitalization of AI and Catchup (thanks go out to Martijn Althuizen for help with this work!)
* minor changes to Dutch localization
* relatively significant changes to the german translation
* fix for the “next game” button flashing after you take an async turn
* close the GameCenter UI if the app goes into the background
* misc additional minor bug fixes

Thanks again for playing Catchup!

After getting two emails almost simultaneously on Sunday morning, both letting me know their game over screens were reporting the wrong winner, I pre-pended the following message to the 1.0.1 release notes, and sat down to find the problem:

WARNING: this update actually causes inaccurate end-game win reporting on the game over screen. (The stats and leaderboard submission should still be correct.) This will be fixed in the next update.

And here are the release notes for version 1.0.2 that I submitted to apple on Sunday afternoon, (September 7th):

v.1.0.2
* fixed bug with incorrect winner name on game over screen (Sorry!)
* corrected title bar string on game screen

All of this illustrates one of the frustratingly difficult aspects of solo application development — regression testing. Or, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, testing existing functionality after a code change “to make sure everything still works”. Basically, it was my work on the new feature (letting the user pick whether or not they go first in an AI game) that broke the game over screen reporting. As bugs go, it’s fairly minor. (I don’t mean to belittle the frustration if you encounter it!) Nothing is crashing, and the win statistics are reported correctly, both to Game Center and the internal stats page. I definitely tested quite thoroughly playing against the AI before submitting 1.0.1, but I just plain didn’t think to check local multiplayer, and might have played through an async game, but I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, I clearly didn’t encounter the bug. (Or didn’t notice if I did.) The specifics are kinda funny: the wrong player name is reported as winning the game in async, but only to one of the players. (Which player depends on who actually won the game.) In the local multiplayer scenario, it basically always reported player 1 as winning.

I have plenty more features to work on for the next build I submit, but figured I should get this fix out there ASAP.