Users of Twitter App on macOS 10.15.1 aka Catalina just found out that they couldn’t log in to their account if their password contained any of the following characters: ‘b’, ‘l’, ‘m’, ‘r’. When I first read the news I thought it was a joke but then realized that its an actual issue in the latest version of the MacOS. The problem is showing up on the Twitter app but other programs might be effected as well.
According to Twitter in-house developer Nolan O’Brien, these particular keypresses are gobbled up by a regression associated with the operating system’s shortcut support. Normally, users can press those aforementioned keys as shortcuts within the app to perform specific actions, such as ‘t’ to open a box to compose a new tweet.
Something changed within macOS to capture those shortcut keys, rather than pass them to the password field in the user interface as expected. So, in other words, when you press a shortcut key in Twitter when entering an account password, the keypress is ignored in that context rather than handled as a legit password keypress.
This reminded me of the weird and basic bugs that showed up in older versions of Windows. Apple really needs to work on their quality control if they want to stay in the game.
– Suramya