Crossword Puzzle randomly resets!

TidBITS Talk
1

Anyone else enjoying the Crossword puzzles in the Apple News+ subscription? We love them. Brings the family together.

But! On a given evening, it’s typical for the following problem to happen at least once: we’ll be well into a puzzle, maybe more than half way done. Then suddenly all the tiles reset to blank! I think it’s accompanied by sort of a flash or redraw of the window, but I’m not sure. It happens so fast.

I’m not sure that my fingers are even on the keyboard or trackpad at the time that it happens. There is a “Clear Puzzle” option you can select with a few clicks, but even that prompts you for confirmation before it proceeds. But of course, I’m not clicking on any such thing (or anything at all).

As you can imagine, this is rather annoying, although we turn it into fun by seeing how good our memory is and how fast we can re-enter all the answers we previously got. But if it were to ever happen twice in the same puzzle, I’m not sure I wouldn’t throw my MacBook onto the floor and start jumping on it. And I’m not sure that would be covered under warranty.

I opened a bug report with Apple:

https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/13740196

Has anyone else observed this??

DK

2

This happens with the New York Times crossword puzzles, too. (Not the Mini, just the full-size puzzles.) Maybe it has something to do with the nature of the beast.

3

Wow, so you’re saying at the nytimes.com website? That’s bizarre. In that case, maybe it’s a feature. Sort of a “let’s randomly erase all their hard work and see how quickly they recover” feature.

4

This is within the Times app, mostly. This has been going on for years.

  • Fill in some answers in the website.
  • Launch the app, and those answers are loaded by the app.
  • Fill the rest of the crossword puzzle within the app.
  • Switch to check the headlines within the app.
  • Return to the puzzle, and… your work is gone.
5

Okay, so this sounds like a version-control conflict when syncing between two devices. This is a classic cloud-sync race condition. And I’ve thought about that. If I were accessing the same puzzle under my same iCloud account on multiple devices, then I would expect the software to choke like this. But I typically just open News on macOS and work from there.

I do AirPlay to the Family Room TV so the family can work on it as a group. I’d be surprised if AirPlay would cause an issue like this, since I’m not enabling Remote Desktop or some other transaction that could allow conflicting control over my screen. Screen mirroring to a TV should be a one-way stream.

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