2.0.0: Feature release

Summary

Version 2.0.0 is a feature release. It was published on the App Store on 10 May 2024.

Below is a summary of changes, taken verbatim from the ChangeLog document. For the full story, a list of issues closed for this release is available here on GitHub.

Features

Support for game variations (#380):

• The app now supports displaying game variations. For that purpose a new view was added at the bottom of the Play tab.
• The new view displays the tree of nodes formed by all variations of the game. The view is therefore named "Node tree" view, or just tree view for short.
• The tree view can be resized, zoomed and scrolled, and you can tap on any node to change the game board to display the content of that node.
• The app also supports creating new game variations: Go back to an older node and play a move and the app will automatically insert a new game variation. Note that in previous versions of the app an alert was displayed in this situation, asking whether you want to discard future board positions.
• A number of new settings were added under "Settings > Tree view" and "Settings > Game variation" that let you control various aspects of how the tree view is rendered and how game variations are inserted.
• If you do not want to work with game variations you can also use the settings to hide the tree view completely and disable creation of new game variations.

Improvements and changes

User manual overhaul (#419):

• The user manual has been rewritten from scratch, complete with icons, illustrations, a few animatons and hyperlinks.
• Besides the in-app version of the user manual there is now also an identical online version that can be accessed in any web browser at https://littlego-usermanual.herzbube.ch/.
• Many users have had trouble with the dry text-only user manual of the past, often being unable to match textual descriptions of icons to the actual buttons in the app. Hopefully this is now an issue of the past. Many thanks go to Andreas Fischlin who gave me the impetus to take on this long overdue task.

Other changes:

• The content of the node list view (formerly called "board position list view") was slightly redesigned. Previous app versions used to show a symbol only for black and white moves, now the app always shows a symbol even if a node does not contain a move. Also the textual representation of some node types was slightly changed.
• The setting "Board position setting > Discard future moves alert" was renamed to the more generic "Discard future nodes alert", because the app now no longer displays only moves, but arbitrary nodes in the node tree view.
• The hotspot icon is now properly centered.

Bugfixes

• In-app web views now continue to display their content after an external link is opened in Safari (#428). Affected views: Help tab, About tab, Credits tab, Source Code tab, and any one of the entries on the Licenses and the Changelog tabs.
• The app no longer crashes when a handicap stone is removed while board setup mode is active (#399).
• Fixed a bug where sometimes handicap stones were not properly marked up while board setup mode was active (#400).
• Labels placed in markup mode are now no longer displayed while board setup mode is active (#420). Because board setup mode has its own markup that is specifically designed to facilitate board setup, it is by design that labels and other graphical elements placed in markup mode are not shown when board setup mode is active.
• When the setting "auto-enable board setup" was enabled and a new game was started with the "rematch" menu option, the app in some cases did not enter board setup mode as designed. This has been fixed (#411).
• Speculative fix for a potential app crash when the UI changes orientation from Portrait to Landscape (#406).

Regressions

• Fixed the "Select player" screen to show a non-transparent background color even when no players are available (#421).

Technical changes

Support for iOS 9 up to 14 has been dropped (#409).

• The minimum required version is now iOS 15.0.
• The following devices are no longer supported:
  • iPhone models: iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5C, iPhone 5S, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
  • iPad models: iPad Mini 1st generation, iPad 2, iPad 3rd generation, iPad 4th generation, iPad Air 1st generation, iPad Mini 2, and iPad Mini 3.
  • iPod models: iPod Touch 5th generation, and iPod Touch 6th generation.
• Although the list of devices is quite long it's not as bad as it might seem because the devices left behind are all quite old. To give an estimate, the newest devices that are now no longer supported were released by Apple 10 years ago, and were discontinued 7-8 years ago.
• The main reason for the change was that new library versions required technical features that older iOS versions could not provide. A secondary reason was to get rid of old cruft in the source code that has accumulated over the years to keep the app running on old iOS versions.

Other technical changes:

• The project has been upgraded to the iOS 17.2 SDK and Xcode 15.1 (#408). One notable change that emerged from the upgrade was that the NSCoding implementation had to be adapted to NSSecureCoding.
• The following third party software has been upgraded to new versions: SgfcKit and libsgfc++ (from 1.0.0 to 2.0.1), Cocoa Lumberjack (from 3.7.4 to 3.8.2) and Firebase Crashlytics (from 8.11.0 to 10.19.0).
• The structure how user preferences are stored has been slightly changed by moving top-level entries into child dictionaries (#404).
• The way how the app internally communicates certain state changes has been changed from the KVO (key-value observing) approach to posting notifications to the global notification centre (#402). The change fixes at least one potential but hard-to-pinpoint bug, but also makes the code more maintainable.