Posted 19th Sep 2013 at 12:47
Last edited by gareth 19th Sep 2013 at 12:50iOS7 is the latest system upgrade for iPhones, iPads and iPods, released yesterday. Unfortunately there are a number of bugs in the latest Safari web browser supplied with iOS 7 (see for example this post which identifies a long list of them), which cause some relatively minor problems with the Puzzlemix player (and much worse with many other web games).

Fundamentally, the Safari browser on the iPad (and possibly other devices) now fails to know its own screen size and so you may find with some puzzles that a little bit of the player is off the edges of the screen on iOS 7. This is particularly a problem on large Hanjie puzzles. Luckily you can still play the games successfully by downloading (for free) and using the Chrome browser on your device. Internally the Chrome browser is almost identical to Safari on all iOS devices (Chrome on iOS is mostly an alternative user interface), but for whatever reason the Puzzlemix players seem to work without trouble on Chrome.

I'll wait a bit to see what fixes Apple release in the next update - which is sure to be soon, because for example all audio application developers have told their customers not to upgrade to iOS 7 due to major problems with the sound system - and then if the issue hasn't gone away I'll have to have the player detect iOS 7 and rescale the content smaller.

I've also observed a bug where touch and drag sometimes stops responding, due to another browser fault. If that happens, you'll have to either just keep tapping or reload the player.

So far I have only upgraded my iPad for testing, but I've read that on the iPhone the long-standing ability for a window to hide the URL bar and gain more screen space no longer functions, so there may well be additional issues with iPhone support.

Like all new operating system upgrades, the often-given advice is to wait for the most important bugs to be ironed out before upgrading.

Gareth, Puzzlemix

Posted 23rd Sep 2013 at 13:53Having since tested on iPhones, it's clear that the browser on iPhone devices has some serious flaws. If you've recently seen people out and about rotating their phone back and forth all the time (I saw this and wondered what everyone was doing!), they're probably using Safari on an iPhone running iOS7! When you touch the top half inch or bottom half inch of the screen, some toolbars pop up on both top and bottom, and there is no way to get rid of them other than rotate the phone one way, wait, then rotate it back. Unfortunately these toolbars pop up and obscure part of the puzzle on iPhone/iPod Touch with iOS 7, so I will need to make the players scale to about 60% of the screen height, which will make them tiny. Unfortunately this is Apple's decision to limit the active browser area to a tiny fraction of the device height, and there's nothing I can do about it. Perhaps they will change their mind, but I doubt it.

Gareth, Puzzlemix