Maintenance and bugfix release

Summary

Version 1.4.0 is a maintenance and bugfix release. It was published on the App Store on January 15 2019.

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.

Known bugs

• On iPhone Plus devices as well as on iPhone XS Max, when the user navigates to the first or last board position most of the time the new current board position is not displayed with a special background color as it should (#326).

Features

• Added support for loading and saving .sgf files that contain stone and/or player setup nodes (#323). This kind of .sgf files is frequently used for sharing board positions that teach how to play best in certain game situations, or that are puzzles to be solved. Notes:
  • It was already possible to load these .sgf files before the change, but Little Go would not display the stones specified by the stone setup nodes, and playing after loading such an .sgf file would usually result in the alert message "Your move was rejected by Fuego".
  • Even after this change, only those .sgf files are properly handled which contain setup nodes at the beginning of the file. Little Go still cannot properly handle .sgf file that contain setup nodes after the first move is played.

Improvements and changes

• The "New game" screen now displays a recommendation to use the area scoring system.
• The "Game info" screen now shows stone and player setup information.
• When the app is started for the first time after the update, two new GTP commands "list_setup" and "list_setup_player" are added to the user's list of GTP commands (Diagnostics > GTP commands).
• The way how an archived game can be shared was re-implemented (UIActivityViewController instead of the long deprecated UIDocumentInteractionController). This may result in users now seeing different sharing options.
• The Changelog is now available in-app

Bugfixes

• When playing with area scoring, the Fuego computer player now correctly includes handicap compensation in its score calculation (#319). Before this fix, the Fuego computer player was calculating scores without handicap compensation, which would lead to it resigning (when playing as white) even though it had actually won the game. Or it might not resign (when playing as black) even though it had actually lost the game. This serious bug was reported by dtsudo - thanks a lot!
• The app now synchronizes komi with Fuego when board positions are changed (#324). Up until now the app never synchronized komi. This omission could lead to the following problems:
  • An .sgf file is saved with the wrong komi value in it.
  • Fuego is likely to play wrong moves. For instance, towards the end of the game Fuego might start to pass because it thinks it is winning, or it might resign because it thinks it is losing. The probability of misplays increases when there is a large difference in komi values.
  • These problems would occur only if the user loaded an .sgf file that contained a different komi value than the last game that was started with the "New game" function, and then changed board positions or discarded a move.
• A bug in the board drawing routines was fixed which caused the app to occasionally crash (#308).

Regressions

• White player influence is now shown correctly with white squares (#317). White player influence was erroneously shown with black squares since the release of version 1.1.0. Thanks for reporting this bug go to ecru86.
• Users that do not have automatic crash reporting enabled are now asked whether they want to submit a crash report (#321). The alert that asks for permission was accidentally disabled since the release of version 1.3.0. Because the alert was disabled, no crash reports were submitted at all unless the user had automatic crash reporting enabled.

Technical changes

• The project has been upgraded to the iOS 12.1 SDK (#314) and Xcode 10.1 (#315)
• Code signing overhaul: Code signing is now managed automatically by Xcode
• The project is now built with Bitcode enabled (#295)
• The project now uses libc++ (#181), the C++ standard library implementation provided by the LLVM project, instead of libstdc++, the GNU project's implementation.
• Communication between Little Go and Fuego is no longer based on named pipes, instead it works with a custom stream buffer that acts as an in-memory pipe (#316). This change was necessary because libc++ has a bug [1] that breaks the original named pipe communication channel. [1] https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23078
• Started migration from Twitter Fabric to Google Firebase (#320). A best effort has been made to disable all other Google services and to only keep Crashlytics enabled. Notably, Firebase Analytics data collection has been explicitly disabled! An explanatory side note: This technical change has become necessary because in January 2017 Google acquired Fabric/Crashlytics and, after a grace period of 1.5 years, announced in September 2018 that they will discontinue Fabric in favour of the Firebase platform. It's all very complicated, but the main point is that Little Go wants to continue to use the excellent Crashlytics as its crash reporting service, and since that now requires integration with the Firebase platform, Little Go has no choice but to follow Google's lead.
• All third party software has been upgraded to their newest versions (Boost 1.69.0, CocoaPods 1.5.3, MBProgressHUD 1.1.0, Cocoa Lumberjack 3.4.2, Fabric 1.6.13, Crashlytics 3.8.6)