OK so working on 6-year-old code that Apple's development environment "helpfully" updated to modern times is cool and good and entirely not making my hair turn greyer at a faster rate than my teenager does already.
Here's where we're at:
The old, busted version of the app that was released lo these many years ago still works great- if you haven't upgraded past iOS version 10 or so. (I think that's right, might be version 8, your experience may vary, consult your dealer for details, for external use only, etc.) But nobody's using that who has anything close to a modern iPhone, so you probably don't even see it in your app store yet.
So I have to figure out what is making it not work. Most of that work is so boring that even I don't want to get into it. Just clearing out digital cobwebs, mostly.
But the big stopper was that we store the site images on this very site, hidden off in an obscure corner of our web space. And the URL to get to it was a plain old http:// address, just like everything else. Apple had the fabulous idea a couple of iOS versions ago to require any app that makes a call to the web to retrieve something must make it via a secure connection. Since that was failing, no images were coming through, which is a Bad Result. So I had to fix that. I think I have that working now, and I'm about to try switching it on, so we can throw two stones at one bird (to coin a phrase):
As a result of all that back-end mucking around, we're going to flip the switch and make fortfiends.net light up your browser as a secure site. This is a Good Thing, because it will help our Google rank, and hey, it's secure. Secure is good, and I have it on good authority that it's at least somewhat better than Not Secure.
And if all that works, one of the main barriers to having an app update out that actually works for everyone will be gone. I don't like giving myself deadlines, but I would say that before the week is out, you Apple folks should have a little gift waiting for you.
Thank you, once again, for reading all the way through another episode of Chris Talks Way Over Everyone's Head About Web Stuff. I love you.
