Flyleaf Update 2.2
iPhone, iPad and Mac
While preparing the just-released 2.2.2 update for Flyleaf, my read-later app for iOS and macOS, I was reminded that I didn’t write anything here about any of the 2.2 patches. So let’s do that now.
Flyleaf 2.2.0
The main reason I pushed out the 2.2.0 update when I did was that a change in the HTML markup of the New York Times website triggered a fatal bug in Flyleaf which would send the app into a continuous crash-on-launch loop. Suffice it to say I heard about this issues from a lot of my users. Apart from that, Flyleaf 2.2.0 introduced a completely overhauled font picker along with some new premium fonts.
Flyleaf 2.2.1
2.2.1 was a very small update which merely fixed an issue with the new font selector and was released just a day or two later.
Flyleaf 2.2.2
Today, Flyleaf 2.2.2 (hopefully) concludes this series of updates by finalizing the new font picker, adding even more fonts, and sanding off even more rough edges in the app’s UI and website parser.
Migrating the Flyleaf App Group name on macOS
I would have released 2.2.2 quite a bit earlier if I wasn’t forced by Apple to change the name of the App Group on macOS. Let me explain: Up until now, Flyleaf on macOS followed the iOS convention of starting the App Group name with “group”. With the release of Sequoia, Apple decided that it would prefer if App Group names on macOS started with the “team ID” of the app’s publisher. And since a couple of weeks ago, App Store Connect would no longer accept macOS builds using an iOS-style App Group name at all. So I had to do something.
The problem is that the App Group contains the app’s list of user preferences as well as the local database holding all added articles and tags. When I change the name of the App Group, Flyleaf loses access to this data. This is not a huge deal since the articles and tags can be re-synched from iCloud (as long as synching is enabled and up to date). But I wanted a more seamless transition.
So I built a little migration flow for the macOS version which uses the system file picker to circumvent the app sandbox to temporarily access the previous App Group directory and move over all the files. This is a little bit scary because it’s difficult to make sure this works as expected in production, but I’m confident I found a good solution. Let’s hope everything goes smoothly and we can forget about this whole thing soon.
Frequently Asked Questions
I have also taken the time to compile a little FAQ page for Flyleaf. I pretty much just went through my emails and put together a list of my generally-applicable answers.
Overall, I feel like Flyleaf is now in a pretty good place in terms of stability and feature offerings. But I still have lots of cool stuff on my roadmap, which I will talk more about at a later time.
If you haven’t yet, you can grab Flyleaf 2.2.2 from the App Store right now. If you appreciate what I’m doing, you can help me a lot by leaving a review on the App Store.
iPhone, iPad and Mac