A couple of weeks ago now we put out version 4.5.6 for macOS, introducing a number of changes to the Google Drive integration. Since then we’ve been working on a couple of issues that have come up, in particular the integration crashing on pre-macOS 10.15 systems. A fix for that bug is in this version. Customers who wish to continue syncing with Google Drive need to be on macOS 10.15 Catalina or later (more on this below).
There’s another bug that has begun begun affecting users on M1 machines, and had us a little puzzled: the Secret Agent feature was failing to work, with the keyboard shortcut background service crashing out with exit code 78. Turns out we weren’t correctly building that helper agent for both Intel and Apple Silicon chip architectures, causing previous version to rely on macOS Rosetta for compatibility, which is not enabled on all M1 Macs. That issue is fixed in this version.
So, what happened with the Google Drive integration:
Google communicated to us repeatedly over the last year that we needed to upgrade the integration we use for Google Drive authorization to avoid a forced deprecation for all users this month, to keep the Sync feature working for these Codebook customers.
Unfortunately, the upgraded authorization support doesn’t support versions of macOS prior to 10.15 (Codebook for macOS currently supports 10.12 and later). We reached out to get clarification on whether we actually needed to do this at all right now, as did other developers, but Google engineers did not respond to multiple support inquiries over the past year until last week, after the deadline they had given us for compliance. It turned out that we didn’t need to do this right now, but we learned that a little too late to change course.
Our current thinking here is that we should just roll forward with the upgraded integration for now, even if that is a stinker for our customers on 10.12-10.14 who also use Google Drive for sync in Codebook. Codebook for macOS supports three other sync services that these customers can use as an alternative until they are ready to upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina or later, and we’d like to avoid another cycle of pulling this integration out to revert to the old one, and re-test, and re-release, only to have to do this again in another year or two when Google does require the new authentication method.
We’re really sorry about this, and if you are adversely affected, we hope we can make it up to you soon!