It took me a few days to notice, because the only time this particular ad even gets USED is when you’re launching Encountr for the first time after (re)installing, or after logging in and pulling your profile to a new device.

The long and short of it: I have to fix and release a new version of Encountr today. There’s nothing whatsoever I can do to retroactively fix copies that are already installed. Well, OK, I’m going to beg the ad network to change back to the old format for at least a few days, but I put the likelihood of that actually working at around .0001%. If your version of Encountr crashes immediately upon launch (or lives long enough to fetch nearby guys and starts displaying them, then crashes), you have to get the new version.

Lesson learned: never, ever allow the app to break if a thirdparty extension over which we have no control breaks. Anyway, I’m working on getting it fixed, and should have 2.96 ready by 8pm Eastern.

Compared to last year’s agony, it was almost *too* easy, and I’m slightly worried. Encountr’s working fine on all three of my phones and my tablet, but just in case… if Encountr is having problems for you, please reboot your phone, try again, and let me know (jason at encountr.net) if you’re still having problems. If you’re running any halfway recent version (and especially if you’re running 2.94) on a phone with Android 2.2 or better, you shouldn’t have any problems whatsoever.

Assuming no real problems are discovered on Thursday, this will become the next official release on Friday as the Eastern timezone celebrates Nerd New Year (11:11:11am on 11/11/11). Otherwise, it might not become official until Pacific Nerd New Year

What’s New?

• Nearby guys auto-refreshes whenever you change the distance, max time, pic/no-pic, and/or age setting.
• Whenever nearby guys refreshes, the screen now gets dimmed and becomes unselectable for about a half second to prevent you from accidentally triggering something unintended a fraction of a second after the screen gets unexpectedly updated.
• Push notifications are now disabled by default if you’re running Honeycomb. The specific problem is that if you have a Honeycomb tablet that only uses wi-fi, and you lose wi-fi connectivity, you’ll get hit by a torrent of popup error messages unless push notifications are disabled. It’s easy to forget to disable them, and I got tired of swatting them away. I’m hoping to have the underlying bug fixed for real within another week or two, but in the meantime this will hopefully save the sanity of everyone who has a tablet. If you really, REALLY want to enable push notifications on a Honeycomb tablet, you can… just go to menu->Notifications and check “Enable Notifications”