EDIT: Please download the latest public beta from the Beta Testing forum if you are using the Yosemite public beta, and be sure to report any bugs to us.
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Last week, Apple made a public beta of OS X 10.10 Yosemite available to anyone who signs up for their beta program. Scrivener users who sign up to the Yosemite public beta should bear the following in mind:
- Scrivener 2.5 is not supported on Yosemite. We will be releasing a Yosemite-compatible update of Scrivener around the same time as Yosemite gets an official release in the autumn (just as we always ensure that Scrivener is updated to run on the latest official release).
- You should never use a beta version of OS X as your main operating system. If you plan to test Yosemite, ensure you install it on a separate drive or partition, or on a secondary computer. Do not use it as your main working OS until Apple releases the golden master shortly before the official release. It’s important that those new to beta-testing an OS do not expect it to work as well as an official release, and know to expect problems running software they rely upon.
- There are a number of known bugs in Scrivener running on Yosemite at the moment, and further graphical bugs owing to the changes in Yosemite’s UI. If you choose to run Yosemite and use Scrivener on it, you will have to put up with these bugs until we release an official update around the same time as Yosemite’s release. (This is just one of the joys of being a beta-tester!)
- There are, however, no major known bugs in Scrivener running on Yosemite at the time of writing - the bugs include such issues as inline annotations not being drawn in colour, the formatting bar using the incorrect background colour, and other minor problems. (There are bugs in Yosemite that can also cause problems, such as certain PNG images not being saved when inserted into text.)
- This is not to say that major bugs could not be revealed, as is always a risk when an OS undergoes a major upgrade. Be sure to back up your work, and do not rely on Yosemite for any critical work yet.
- We will of course be grateful for any bugs reported to us regarding Scrivener running on Yosemite as our aim, as ever, is to ensure that, come 10.10’s release, we have a version of Scrivener than runs perfectly on it. However, if you do find issues, please be patient once you’ve reported them. Hopefully we will be able to release some public betas of Scrivener with some of the fixes prior to Yosemite’s release (via our own public beta-testing forum), but owing to current time constraints (including work on the iOS version), such fixes are likely to come only much closer to Yosemite’s release in the autumn.
- Because Yosemite is still in development at Apple, please note that our support team will not be able to help resolve Yosemite-specific problems. All of our support staff will continue to run Mavericks for the time being; it is only our development staff (i.e. me, along with Ioa and Jennifer who work on testing Scrivener thoroughly) who will be running Yosemite for now. Our support team will therefore be unable to help with problems relating to the Yosemite beta, and will merely be passing any bugs reported along to me, so that I can put them on the list for investigation prior to Yosemite’s release.
Remember: When you download and use beta software, you are not just getting access to that software early; you are accepting that the software is not ready to be released yet and is likely to have many bugs, which you are helping to find (and report) so that they can be fixed before everybody else uses the software. You are a guinea pig, in other words, and you therefore use it at your own risk and should not rely on it for anything critical until the official release.
Reporting Bugs
If you do find bugs with running Scrivener on Yosemite, when you report these bugs to us, please provide step-by-step instructions explaining how we can reproduce the problem. Just telling us “it’s broke” doesn’t help us address the issue.
Therefore, when you find something isn’t working properly, before reporting it, please try to make the same thing happen again. If you can reproduce the problem every time, and can find and describe the exact circumstances under which something breaks, that means that we should be able to see the problem too, which makes finding the cause and fixing it much easier. If we can’t reproduce something on our end, it makes it very difficult for us to find and fix the problem. The more vague the description of the problem, or if a bug seems completely random, the more difficult it us for us to know how to find the bug and fix it.
With all of the above in mind, we will be very grateful to those intrepid enough to use Yosemite and Scrivener and who send us helpful bug reports. (You can report bugs either via this forum or via mac.support AT literatureandlatte.com.)
Thanks and all the best,
Keith
Known Bugs on Yosemite (To Be Fixed for Release)
- The format bar is unresponsive in full screen mode.
- Smart quotes and automatic spelling correction causes a crash in scrivenings mode.
- Minor UI issues caused by Yosemite’s new look (e.g. the format bar uses the wrong background colour).
- Many PNG files that are embedded into text can fail to write to disk. This issue can cause data loss, as images will be lost from the text. When you save and load text files containing affected PNG files, the text will contain strange mark-up code where the image was previously. This is a known bug in Yosemite that fails to create data properly for many PNG files, and I have reported it to Apple as bug ID#17728605. I have a workaround that I can implement if Apple does not fix this, but the workaround will increase embedded PNG file sizes, so I am very much hoping that Apple will take notice of the bug report and fix this before Yosemite is released. IMPORTANT: If you experience this bug, please take the time to report it to Apple via the Feedback Assistant app (as instructed on Apple’s beta program page), and make sure you mention we have told you it is a Yosemite bug that we have reported to them as bug ID#17728605. The more people who report it to Apple, the more chance it will be fixed before release (and furnishing them with the bug ID# will allow their engineers to look up the technical details with which I have provided them).
- The project targets panel may crash when setting a target.
- Sharing services such as those that allow you to share text or targets via Twitter or Facebook no longer work in 32-bit apps on Yosemite, and therefore no longer work in Scrivener. I have reported the issue to Apple, but if they do not fix this, then sharing services will no longer work in Scrivener until it is upgraded to 64-bit (a 64-bit version is coming next year).
- The colour pickers in the formatting bar show a long grey blank area.