New Issues with iOS 12.1

[rbytes]

Something has happened to Dropbox with the release of iOS 12.1 (It could also have been the November 7th update of Dropbox - yet I have been transferring programs from iPad to iPhone via Dropbox every day for the past week, so likely would have spotted the issue earlier than today if Dropbox itself was the cause)

Symptom:
A program that ran fine on my iPhone- after being copied to Dropbox and then to my iPad - would not run! Ton, this may get your attention. Dropbox had converted many special characters to their html equivalents! So & became &amp; - > became &gt; - < became &lt; and so on.

Of course every such change resulted in a program termination with a syntax error.

I couldn't believe it had actually happened, and thought I had copied the wrong file. So I went through the entire process again and got the same result. Just as when Apple changed our standard quotes and apostrophe in iOS 11, I'm sure we will soon be able to search the web for and find discussions of this phenomenon.

Ton, we should be able to counter the problem by using your Clarify code.sb to convert the html back to the standard characters.

It would be helpful for others to test this issue and report on it if you have upgraded to 12.1. I plan to copy a working program on my iPad to Dropbox and from there to my iPhone - to see if the html substitution occurs in that direction too.

[rbytes]

Another process has become slower and less reliable in iOS 12.1 - copying.

I am referring to the process of copying large files, such as some of our programs posted on the Forum. Even with iOS 11 and iOS 12.0, I found it painfully slow to copy iConvert 4 Alpha and Risk. I could highlight the program text fairly quickly, but it took many seconds before the popup menu appeared, allowing me to copy. All the time I was waiting, my iPad screen remained frozen.

Since installing iOS 12.1 this afternoon, after I select a large amount of text in sB or on the Forum, the popup menu NEVER reappears, so I am unable to copy. Force quitting and restarting Safari or Smart Basic doesn't help.

[Mr. Kibernetik]

Does this happen for file with any extension?
Even if you change your text file extension to .ZIP these special characters are also changed?

[rbytes]

I will test for that tomorrow.

[GeorgeMcGinn]

I have kept iOS version 10.3.3 on my iPad and I just not only copied The iConvert Alpha and the Risk game quickly and with no issues going from the iPad to dropbox and from drop box back to the iPad.

I've also done large data files that were in like the hundred megabyte range and .gz and .zip files and everything worked fine and quickly both ways. One of the large files contain every ZIP Code in the United States and Canada and the file includes the city name and state and or Providence. This went very quickly as well.

I would think since SmartBASIC hasn't been updated since before iOS 11 came into being, my logical guess would be that something in Dropbox changed. I'm wondering if you put the SDK for the new Dropbox into Xcode and see if it's an issue there, but I have never gotten that to work, meaning copying files from Dropbox into Xcode. I'm not sure it even uses the SDK files in Xcode, and if it did, there might be compatibility issues with the old smartBASIC code.

[rbytes]

I can copy and paste files with no delay. The delay is only in selecting text to copy, and it only becomes a problem when the text block goes beyond a certain size.