If you find that the rubrics in a Universalis page, which are usually red, appear in either black or white with a fringe of the opposite colour round each letter, then this is because you have turned on the experimental “high contrast” mode in Android, which makes these changes to any text displayed by an app.

The spoken audio of the Readings at Mass and of the Liturgy of the Hours is available on subscription. It is very simple to use. If you haven’t tried it before, do! You can listen to a sample before you subscribe.

How it works is this: you press the Play button, and a real, recorded human voice will speak the whole of the page you are looking at: the readings at Mass or one of the Hours. A yellow highlight follows the spoken lines and sentences, so you always know where you are.

You can read more about it all here for Android and here for iPhone and iPad.

The purpose of this blog post is to go just a little below the surface so that you can understand how it all behaves.

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If you are using Catholic Calendar on a very old iPad running iOS 9.3.5, you may have difficulty activating it with your registration code. An error message can appear saying “An SSL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be established”.

The same problem will occur with Universalis as well, if you have subscribed to the spoken audio and the app needs to download it. The cause is the same and so is the cure.

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Mac OS has a ‘dark mode’, in which text is light on a dark background, taking us back to the 1980s and the era of VDUs. The Universalis app and program for the Mac now obey the dark mode and if you select it in the system settings, the text in Universalis will be light on a dark background.

It appears that some people want to have Mac OS in dark mode but still have Universalis displaying dark text on a light background. This is rather an unexpected requirement, but Mac OS does allow this to happen. Here are the instructions.

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A user in New Zealand has reported an interesting problem. He uses the Universalis application on his iPhone to create a “Universalis Automatic” event calendar with details of each day’s feast. He then plugs his iPhone into his Mac and synchronizes it, and finds that on his Mac, in iCal, every feast appears one day late.

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The Windows Mobile version of the Universalis download will not work on Windows Phone 7. This is the result of a deliberate policy decision by Microsoft and there is nothing that we are able to do about it. Unless and until Microsoft change their mind, the only options for Universalis users (apart from the web site) are e-books or the automated email service.

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