crashing iPhone app

Hey all ... I'm one of the mobile developers here at Calorie Count. Many apologies for the issues you're seeing, we're currently in the process of wrapping up a new release that should definitely fix up some of the crash issues you're seeing.We hope to have it released on the app store soon.

We can always be reached at iphone@caloriecount.com if we happen to miss a post here.

And as it turns out, the app was certified and published on the app store shortly after I made this post yesterday :) Please do let us know if the situation improves after you download the update.

Thanks for sticking by our side!
-Joel

Hey Everyone,

The new update that was released last night introduced a problem with the Calorie Camp feed. Essentially it's a problem with special characters that members might occasionally use in their posts, and which our app is not handling correctly in this latest build. Once the feed is loaded and cached, it will force your app to crash every time until you remove and reinstall the app.

We hope to be able to fix the problem by modifying the data sent to the app as opposed to having to push a code fix to the app (because the latter would require us to go through Apple's approval process and would take some time). Earlier this afternoon we fixed at least one of the problems, but we're hearing from our users that there are additional issues which are still causing the app to crash on start up.

We're really sorry for the interruption and please rest assured that we won't go to bed before this is resolved. We're currently working with a handful of our users trying to track down every occurrence of the problem, and hope that this will be all fixed in the next couple of hours (famous last words...). I will make sure to follow up with an update later tonight.

Igor

Ok, status update: the problem stems from an incorrectly working truncation feature. We truncate all reports to a certain length, but rather than making it a fixed character limit, we tried to be smart and trim the content only where it grammatically and contextually made sense (ie: not in the middle of the sentence, etc).

There are two ways to fix this:

- Fix the problem on the client side by creating a new build - this will fix the problem once the new version gets approved by Apple and once everyone downloads it (this is in progress but obviously not an ideal solution).

- Determine all edge cases which trigger the truncation feature to misbehave, and prevent them by manipulating the content that's fed to the client. For example, we found out that empty reports cause problems (we are adding a blank space to them now), as well as ellipses at the end of the reports (we're replacing them with a single period). This type of work is just a temporary fix and will help us reduce the number of crashes until the permanent solution is in place.

So we're currently working on both approaches. Particularly the second approach has significantly reduced the number of crashes, but I have to admit that there are still many other edge cases that we still have to find. If you're interested in helping us find those problems, please follow these directions:

- If your app hasn't crashed, continue using it. If and when it does, proceed to the next step.

- If you're trying to relaunch the app and it does so successfully, please submit the crash report but don't worry about the next steps because the crash that you found is not what's causing the truncation issues. If, however, your app cannot launch again, proceed to the next step.

- Log into your website account and take a screenshot of the Calorie Camp feed. This will help us identify the content that was sent to your app before it crashed. Please email those screenshots to igor at caloriecount dot com.

- To continue using the app, you'll have to clear the cache. The only way to do that is to uninstall the app and to reinstall it. And you'll have to wait ca. 20 minutes before the content that crashed the app the first time disappears from your Calorie Camp feed so that it doesn't crash it again.

Once again, many apologies for this inconvenience - we're working around the clock trying to fix this particular problem, and will make sure to examine how we let this happen in the first place.