For much of the last few weeks I’ve been focusing on bug fixes in UX Write. While I’m keen to get additional features in – most notably .docx and ODF support – I consider stability to be very important and there were quite a few bugs and usability issues in 1.0.1 that really needed to be fixed. I’ve been spending some of my time on file format support, and am making sufficiently good progress that I was considering waiting until that was complete before doing another release. But I figured that now all the really noticeable problems (at least those I’m aware of!) have been fixed, I decided to submit an interim update. I’m happy to say that it’s just been approved by Apple, and you can now download it from the app store.

Here’s a full list of all the changes in version 1.0.2:

Bug fixes:

• Incorrect margins when printing or exporting to PDF under iOS 6
• Incorrect handling of style and list changes in HTML files exported by MS Word
• Inability to delete a link or reference in some cases
• Inability to open files whose name contains a question mark
• Inability to use Cmd-A (select all) keyboard shortcut with external keyboards
• Blue selection highlights remaining in file after save or paste in some cases
• Bracket and double quote keys not being updated properly after pressing backspace
• “Go to” menu item not working for mailto: links
• Crash when using double-tap-and-drag gesture
• Crash when triple-tapping the margin area next to a table
• Crash when adding new line at top of file and pressing space
• Crash when editing figure properties if image width cannot be determined
• Crash when turning off figure or table number when the cursor is inside the caption
• Crash when deleting table of contents, pressing undo, and deleting it again
• Crash when encountering certain types of CSS styles exported from other apps
• Crash when encountering an invalid HTML table structure
• Crash when using iOS’s built-in typing shortcut replacement
• Crash when encountering two files with the same name but different capitalisation
• Text fields: Cursor always placed at end even when typing earlier in text
• WebDAV: Inability to connect to servers that use digest authentication
• WebDAV: Inability to upload files on some servers
• WebDAV: Empty directory listings on some servers

Performance improvements:

• Improved document load speed by a factor of 2
• Run autosave in the background, while you keep on typing
• Fixed severe performance problems when editing large HTML files exported by MS Word
• Fixed severe performance problems when saving large HTML files exported by LaTeX2HTML

Usability improvements:

• Made it easier to select and delete tables, figures, and table of contents
• When typing ” using the external keyboard, replace with “ or ” as appropriate
• Allow ” character to be entered by pressing ” twice (e.g. for expressing inches)
• Auto-capitalise “I” and similar words like “I’ll” or “I’d”
• Formatting menus: Dismiss automatically once a value is selected
• Web links: Use selected text and URL from clipboard when displaying insert view
• File browser: For conflicts, display a message and offer to rename the file
• File browser: For file-specific errors, show error message when tapping on status icon
• File browser: Display server connection errors at the bottom of the screen
• WebDAV: Optional diagnostics mode for troubleshooting purposes

Thanks to all of you who have submitted bug reports – in particular those which contain info on how to reproduce the problem (which can be extremely helpful in some cases). I appreciate your patience with getting these problems solved, and I think you’ll find that 1.0.2 is much more usable than the previous release.

Now that I’ve gotten these out the way, I’m focusing pretty much all my time on getting support for .docx and ODF implemented. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in future posts – stay tuned!