Not displaying characters in game

[lockerc18]

Using an iPad3, just installed IOS9. Trying to do my daily crossword puzzle at washingtonpost.com. I believe the game is written in Javascript. After I enter a few clues, the letters stop appearing when I enter them. The cursor advances, so the game is aware that a letter was clicked on. But the square stays blank with no letter appearing. I start the game over and try it again, and after some random amount of time, it starts happening again. No letters.

While this is not an Earth shattering problem, it's not the first bug I've found with IOS9. See my thread "The Incredible Shrinking Page". And I have to believe this same bug happens with other apps, not just the silly little crossword puzzle I do every darn morning.

After the debacle with IOS 8, I figured Apple would get its act together and do some actual testing before they released a new version. But evidently not.

Apple's quality control is for crap.

Well, Tim, I guess if you keep selling iPhones faster than you can build them, to heck with the rest of your product lineup.

 

[Command]

Have you by chance tried to clear the Safari cache, just in case? Settings, Safari, Clear History and Website data (does of course clear history).
Also, ensure the JavaScript option is on /toggled on / off, while in there.

 

[lockerc18]

Just an update on this... the Washington Post released a new version of their crossword puzzle game. It's better in some ways, but not all. The problem with not displaying characters at times has disappeared. But a new problem was introduced, which is that sometimes, the character pointer in the game stops advancing to the next letter position. I know, this is not a huge problem. But it's curious.

I tried this out on my Kindle Fire HD, which runs Android, and it happened there, too. So it may not be a problem specific to IOS, since it happens on an Android as well. But I tried it on my rMBP, and it doesn't happen there. This is not a downloadable app. It's on the web directly. I used Firefox on my rMBP, Safari on my iPad3, and whatever the embedded browser is on my Kindle.

What's curious about this is that Android is based on Linux. IOS is based on OSX, which is not based on Linux. So, it would appear that the game should behave the same on both IOS and OSX, with no relation to how it behaves on Android. Yet, the exact same bug appears on Android and IOS, but not on OSX. Perhaps this is due to the way screen handling is done on touch devices, and Android and IOS somehow do this particular thing the same way, whereas OSX doesn't. Or it could be that the Javascript implementations on IOS and Android are equally poor. I don't know.

It's difficult to draw conclusions from this kind of test, which is admittedly nowhere close to exhaustive. But it would seem to me that, while there is probably still a bug in the game itself, it's also reasonable to conclude that touch interfaces still have room for interface bugs, too. Especially release-to-release compatibility bugs, since this issue didn't happen until I put IOS9 onto my iPad3. So, the blame still goes partly to Apple for introducing this bug in that release.

But one thing this does make very clear to me is that OSX is a FAR superior OS environment than IOS. That might sound strange, since IOS is essentially OSX with a touch interface. And I know, the two OSes are made for very different platforms and user interfaces and all that. But I see problems with IOS in general (see also: IOS8) that NEVER show up on OSX, and they don't always deal with touch vs keyboard input things. I think the quality control in IOS is much worse than in OSX. It's hard to believe that any regression testing is done with IOS at all. And, honestly, that will keep me from buying another IOS device again. No iPad Air 3 if that ever comes out. No iPad Pro. No more IOS. OSX is just fine for me. Others may disagree.