Version 1.4.5 has some problems. If you always use your device in portrait mode, you may never have noticed, but issues can arise when switching back and forth between landscape and portrait. We designed Spell the Beans from the beginning to handle rotation under any circumstances, so it’s distressing for us as well as any affected users. [Update: It was an issue related to non-standard orientation (face up or down as opposed to portrait or landscape). The updated version 1.4.6 is now available on the App Store.]
The main problem is, in the Spell the Coffee variation in landscape mode, sometimes pressing the New Game button displays a spill in a vertical orientation which goes beyond the normal rectangular spill area. This should never happen. It may even revert to a spill from a previous game, with the letter positions all mixed up. A trigger seems to be reopening the app in landscape after it has dropped out of the background, which is sometimes at the discretion of iOS.
What to do
If this happens, the best thing to do is to first make sure the orientation of the spill matches the current orientation of your device. Often you can do this by rotating your device back and forth (obviously with orientation lock off). Additional use of the New Game button will also probably be part of the fix. In cases that seem intractable, as always, deleting the app and re-downloading (there’s never an extra cost for this on iOS devices) will get things back to normal. If you’ve had no trouble, you may not need to do anything.
Once you’ve got it working right, we would suggest using orientation lock and keeping the game in portrait mode. If we can’t quickly fix the problem, we may just put out a release which only allows play in portrait until we can right the ship. We hate to limit the ways to enjoy the game, but it’s all for the best. We apologize for the problems we’ve caused, and we’ll try to get this ironed out as soon as we can.
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