You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
I use a screenwriting software called Beat, and have done for a few months. It seems to work well, but every time I log into it a Syntax Error message always comes up when I open the page. Also, if I try to do "Show Index Cards" a bigger error comes up. Should I be worried about this? Could it harm my computer or contain malware/viruses?
I'm not familiar with this software, but it looks like it supports some sort of plugins and/or scripts that extend its basic functionality.
It looks like someone made a mistake when writing a program, script, or structured configuration file that "Beat" wants to use. I do not know what the specific mistake is, but the program that was reading the bad file saw a '.' character where it did not expect to see one, and rejected the input as faulty.
For instance, here is a C program with a deliberate error (the '.' after "printf").
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf.("Hello, world!\n");
return 0;
}
When I try to compile this program, the compiler chokes on the '.' and throws out an error. It did not use the term 'SyntaxError', but "syntax error" is the generic name for this type of error.
% cc -o syntax syntax.c
syntax.c:5:12: error: expected identifier
printf.("Hello, world!\n");
^
1 error generated.
The syntax error is not, in and of itself, an indication that the program contains malware or viruses. It is an indication that whatever feature or extension you are trying to use may not work properly until the underlying issue is fixed.
I would suggest checking with the "Beat" developers, and/or the developers of any plug-ins you may have installed, to get to the bottom of that.
Is this the application? It's an Open Source application whose macOS version is free.
There's a bug report link on the site. The developer (who is doing this in their spare time) asks you to be sure that you are running the latest version before you file a report, presumably so they aren't forced to waste time chasing bugs that are already fixed.
Syntax Errors on Beat Screenwriting Software?