5.9.1: A Fix for Mac Monterey
In Apple’s latest macOS update (Monterey 12 and above) they have degraded support for HTML and CSS in one of their primary APIs—an API that Wunderverse relies upon extensively for rendering story text. This means for Mac Monterey users running version 5.9 or earlier of Wunderverse, it crashes any time you try to open a story.
This is a big challenge for us to fix because we need this HTML/CSS support to provide all our story formatting, and we’ve depended upon it since the very first release of Wunderverse back in 2016. Without it, we would have to completely re-write our story viewer (more on that in a minute). We reported this to Apple as soon as we discovered the problem, even giving them example code to run so that they could see how (and even why) their change had broken and degraded their HTML support. We heard nothing back from them after six weeks of waiting, which is not that unusual for Apple. Sometimes it even means they are already aware of the problem and are working on a fix. But not always. So we anxiously waited in the dark for their final 12.3 update to be released last week, hoping the problem would go away.
Unfortunately it did not. We upgraded, here, to 12.3 the second it was available and the crash was still there.
The Path Forward
As we were waiting to hear from Apple, we began scrambling to come up with a fallback plan. In fact, we are actually already in the process of re-writing our viewer for an upcoming release of Wunderverse later this year. Which, coincidentally, does not rely on this degraded API at all. But it’s a major re-write, with lots of new behavior and features, that we were really hoping to let users ease into gradually at their own pace, keeping the old viewer as an option for their existing stories, and letting them use the new viewer for the new stories they create. Plus we still have a lot of work to do on it.
So that wasn’t going to be an option for us to fix this crash.
But with some quick re-thinking and re-working of our current code, we were finally able to find a way to prevent the crash and still render story text (mostly) the way it had been before. This allowed us to get a quick hot-fix out (version 5.9.1), available in the Mac App Store now.
The biggest problem, however, with this change Apple has made in Monterey is that the API no longer supports custom fonts, custom line spacing, and CSS shadow effects (which we use to give story text its embossed look). The shadow effect we were OK sacrificing for now. But custom fonts and line spacing were essential to rendering story text. This meant we had to do a little hacking to come up with a way to apply fonts and line spacing as before. We tested this workaround as much as we could in an effort to get a fix out as quickly as possible, but there are going to be some side-effects in story formatting you may notice. Drop caps, for example, are going to be a little off for now. And you may notice some text sizes that are a bit larger than they were before. We’ll continue to see if we can improve this over time with the current API, and it should be a complete non-issue once the new viewer is ready later this year.
Until, then, thanks so much for your patience as we worked through finding a fix for this crash. We hope the update in 5.9.1 is acceptable for now, in order to get Wunderverse working again on the Mac. Please do let us know in our forums if you see any other problems or issues you would like us to correct. In the mean time, we’ll get back to working on the new story viewer that we think you’re REALLY going to like. Stay tuned, later this year, for news on that.