Apple recently updated the system software, iOS, to version 6.1.2. They did this to fix problems that the prior release had created for some people who use Microsoft Exchange for (among other things) contact lists. In creating this fix, they did something that has, once again, messed up Peak Meetings.

Apparently, when a user taps the Email button, the app crashes. I’m not in an Exchange environment, so it still works fine for me. But I’m committed to getting this fixed, even though I had no way of knowing this would happen. Of course, getting fixes nailed down and through the App Store approval process can take 2-3 weeks.

[UPDATE: 3/4]

I’ve heard from several people who have been hit by this and, unfortunately, there’s no common result — other than it crashing. For one user, it crashed when he had no Attendees listed, but it worked normally once he added Attendees. Another user tried four variations that I threw at him, and nothing worked.

If you need to get meeting data off the app NOW, try this:

1) With the meeting file open, tap the VIEWS button in the upper left corner. Then select either “Total View: Basic” or ”Total View: Agenda”. This opens a window with your content formatted according to your selection (and similar to how it would be in an email).

2) Press and hold your finger on a word in that window (e.g. “Goal”). After a moment, a blue highlight with handles will appear over the word, along with the choices “Copy” and “Define”.

3) Grab the left handle and drag it upwards. This should quickly select all your text (laying a light blue shade over everything) AND should give you a black button that says “Copy”.

4) Tap that Copy button, then tap “Done” on the window.

5) Switch to your email program or Pages (if you’re using that on your iPad). Open a new email or new Page, then press and hold until you see a string of options that includes the word “Paste”.

6) Tap on Paste, and all your meeting content should appear. From there, you can tweak things, as needed.

There are a couple quirks. When I tried this in email, it showed blue and brown arrows on the right side, as you might see in Peak Meetings (but without the colored bars). When I sent the email to myself, however, those arrows were replaced by little blue squares indicating that a graphic was missing. If you copy the data into Pages, it brings only the text, not the bullets, separating lines, or those quirky arrows.

I realize this is not an ideal solution, but it will give you a way to use your data outside of Peak Meetings, until we can get the problem resolved, and then run through the approval process at the App Store.

We’re beginning work on a web version of Peak Meetings. Not only will it give us greater flexibility and speed in updating the app, it will also free us from being victimized by Apple’s changes. (The new version will also be dramatically better in terms of what it can do, how it works, and the capabilities it offers you.) If you’d like to be a beta tester, please let me know.

Regards, John

Updates to Peak Meetings HD and the iPhone-only version have just gone live on the App Store. These updates were prompted by changes Apple made in iOS6, which messed up some things in these apps. We talked about this in the last post, but something else has just popped up (of course, now that it’s live…).

On the iPhone, regardless of the version you are using, the spiffy two-toned backgrounds we had have mysteriously (and unceremoniously) been replaced by a standard Apple striped background. This doesn’t affect how the app works, and some of you may even find this a refreshing change. At any rate, *we* didn’t plan that.

Love it? Hate it? Don’t care? Let us know

UPDATE (9/28): Just found out there is a problem with saving meetings, or action items, to a calendar. Basically, you can’t now (thanks, Apple …), because a message pops up saying that no calendar has been selected — and there is no way I’ve seen thus far to select or set up a calendar. So . . . we’ll put this on our list and see what other problems arise in the next few days.

UPDATE (10/1): A new problem has surfaced for one user (see Comments below), when trying to sort by Date. The app crashes when she tries that. I have tried to reproduce this on three separate devices, two running iOS6 and one running iOS5.1, and I it has worked correctly. We take all problems seriously, but they are harder to find and fix when we can’t reproduce them. If you have encountered the same issue, please let us know!

Thanks so much for your patience.

The new release of iOS software has caused a couple problems in Peak Meetings. The most significant one relates to dates & times — they’re suddenly gone! They shouldn’t be wiped out of your database, but for some reason they are no longer displayed (once you’ve upgraded to iOS6).

If you create a new meeting — dates & times are there. If you select a meeting created before you upgraded, you can reselect a date & time, and they’ll be shown. AND, the dates of Action items are still displayed. There’s just something wacky about the meeting date & time. We’re looking into that right now.

Apple also has a new scheme for the gradient on the top bar, which washes out the upper part of the icons in that bar.

If you notice anything else, please let us know!

UPDATE: Our fixes are now live on the App Store. There was, of course, a compromise we had to make in fixing the date/time issue. Once you’ve downloaded the PM update, your old dates & times will be restored. BUT, it’s possible anything new you set up, or any dates/times you revised after upgrading to iOS6, may be washed out. You will just need to re-insert those. Sorry we couldn’t preserve both, but it was looking extremely complex to do.

 If you hadn’t heard yet, all is now clear with updates for Peak Meetings HD. I got the word out  in other mediums, but this thing was sooo tedious that it took me a while to go, “Oh, yeah, the blog . . .”

Ultimately, I have no idea why Apple took so incredibly long to approve the update. As mentioned before, the fix to the loading problem was resolved in the first iteration of the 2.3.4 update. Apple rejected the update, though, because of an incredibly obscure violation of their UI rules — something that has never been mentioned by the thousands of Peak Meetings users over the past 16 months, nor dinged by App Store reviewers in six previous submissions.

But rules are rules, so we had to tweak it and resend the update to Apple, and that’s where everything bogged down. Fortunately, all is now clear, so onward to great meetings!

That’s how long Peak Meetings HD has been “In Review” with the App Store group. I don’t have a clue what’s going on, but it makes no sense to me that it would be in review for that long. When the 1.0 version of PM was submitted to Apple, the “In Review” period last three hours. Since then, having gone through five or six updates, none of them have lasted significantly longer, and some have been as quick as an hour.

So for this to be at 37 60 hours and counting . . . ? Not a clue. And all I get via Apple are vague comments like “these things take time” and “we have a process”.

As mentioned before, I’ll post here once the update DOES get approved and I’ve been able to verify it.

Thanks for your patience. (Can I borrow some ?)

So I got Apple to do an “Expedited Review” of the app, in hopes of getting the new, safe version out to you today.

And it just got rejected!

And not for anything relating to the fix — this update was rejected for something that has been in the app since the beginning.

So, okay, this error doesn’t meet Apple’s guidelines. You’re not supposed to be able to have two “popovers” open at the same time (which, in our case, are the Meetings List and the Search List). So we’re technically out of compliance on that.

But between the initial launch and all the subsequent updates, this has passed through the App Store approval process six times or so, with never so much as a whiff of rejection.

With this rejection, I have to send it back to the programmers, who won’t be back at work until Monday. It should be quick and easy to fix, but then we have to throw it back to Apple again, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get another “Expedited Review”. If we can get it, then we stand a chance of having this out by early next week. If it needs to just go to the end of the queue, however, it could be up to a week after we submit it before it clears the approval process.

Makes me all the more committed to doing a web-version of Peak Meetings . . . (Arrrrrgggghhh!)

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

Still no word yet from Apple on what might be amiss, but a user in Portugal has experienced something intriguing. He has two iPads (v1 & v2). Having not seen our warnings, he downloaded the update on his Mac and then synched his iPad2 in iTunes. Result: NO PROBLEM with the Peak Meetings HD update.

Then he downloaded the update to his iPad1 — directly within the iPad. Result: FAIL.

So, if you’ve downloaded the PM HD update via iTunes on your computer, you should be safe to synch it with your iPad. But if you’ve downloaded the update directly on your iPad (as I did, with three iPads), then you’re probably hosed at the moment. And if you haven’t yet downloaded the update, you might as well hold off on the update.

Meanwhile, new downloads should be fine, even directly on the iPad. I tested this by deleting PM HD on one of our iPads and then installing a new copy. Result: NO PROBLEM.

Weird . . .

Version 2.3.3 of Peak Meetings HD was just approved for the App Store less than an hour ago, but there’s some kind of problem. Once a user downloads the update, when they tap the icon to load Peak Meetings HD, there’s a blip on the screen and then the user is returned to the Home screen.

Since the app worked fine in final testing, and the update consisted of a change to one small thing, and it had to have worked for the App Store reviewer to give his/her blessing, my suspicion is that the problem is from Apple’s side. Maybe some download box that wasn’t checked?

I’ve sent in an urgent query to Apple, but “urgent” is my word. There’s no mechanism to move this to the top of the queue, nor is there a phone number I can call to get immediate action. So, for the moment, don’t download the update. I’ll post here again when the app is truly ready for you.

I’m so sorry about this problem. (and horrified at this result . . .)

Finally, the BIG update is almost ready. It was submitted to Apple today, and they typically take 3-7 days to approve it. We got in everything I had earlier promised, with one exception — creating a PDF of the meeting contents. That was going to take another week+ (or so the estimate went), and I didn’t want to hold this up any longer. Of course, that was in November, and the testing and tweaking went on way longer than expected, which is why we’re into freakin’ December now.

BUT, it’s almost here. Let the countdown begin. (At which point, I can exhale…)

Meanwhile, if you want a sneak peek at what’s included, check out the Overview video I’ve just posted in the “How-To” section.