The issues with the 2.3.3 update, which went live earlier this week, have been sorted out. A new update (v2.3.4) has been submitted to Apple and the approval will, hopefully, be expedited. I’ll put up a new notice here once I’ve confirmed that the production version of the 2.3.4 update is okay.
And, most important, your data are safe. The crash in 2.3.3 occurs as Peak Meetings is trying to load. Nothing in that loading effort affects your database — you just can’t get to it. (Me, too, since my iPads experienced the same fate.)
Meanwhile, if you’re curious about how all this came down, pull up a chair . . .
The 2.3.3 update was meant to fix one small thing — an orientation error that most people probably didn’t realize or bother with. But it really annoyed one user, enough so that he wrote to us to complain. I was able to repeat what he experienced and, yeah, it was annoying. It seemed like a very simple fix — probably one line of added code — so I asked the programmers to take care of it. They did, I tested it, and everything seemed fine. We submitted it to Apple, a week later it was approved for release, and then it started to crash!
WTF?! It was a simple change. How could this have failed?!
And then I found out that it didn’t fail for everyone. WTF?!
And I had the damnedest time trying to get connected to someone at Apple who could actually help me. I mean, I love the company. We own Apple stock. But the byzantine nature of the App Store approval process and what may or may not transpire is baffling. I figured, since it was such a simple change and it had tested fine on my machine, that perhaps someone on their end missed a step or something. Right? It is humans manning things, after all.
Well, to make a long (painful) story slightly shorter, it wasn’t human error at Apple. There may yet be something weird in their download processes, since this failed for some and not for others, but the root of the problem is in our code.
It turns out that the one line we added was not the issue. What slammed us all (those whose iPads failed) was a conflict that arose in the code, following the previous update. The 2.3.2 update, which came out in mid-December, was huge for Peak Meetings. To add the Agenda View capabilities, which so many people asked for, we had to make changes to the database.
The update process for 2.3.2 went off without a hitch. But there was lurking in the code a database check that slammed us on this update. This “NSAssert” command was part of the original code, written by the prior development group I worked with, to ensure the integrity of the database at launch. But the database now (v2.3.2 and beyond) is different than what the NSAssert was looking for, and so the app crashes since it can’t resolve the conflict.
That conflict has now been resolved. We’ll soon have a clean, workable version available for all users. You can get back to your productive lives. And I can exhale . . .
To all those who suffered the failed state, my deepest apologies and my greatest appreciation for your patience. — John
