Roughly half a year ago, we started distributing Butler as what we called a transient version, which basically meant it would stop working at some point in time, namely tomorrow. We did this because back then, we weren't sure where we would be going with Butler. Similar to Witch, Butler had been distributed as donationware for years, and we knew we couldn't really afford keeping that up, as detailed for Witch in this blog entry.
So when we converted Witch into shareware, we also did that to test the waters for Butler 5. We wondered: How are the users going to react to this transition? Will they be willing to update, or will they just continue using the old version?
I can honestly say that I was blown away by the response to Witch 2.0 — going shareware solicited nothing but positive feedback, and I think it's safe to say it was an economic success as well. Given that experience, we knew: Butler 5 will be shareware. As always, past donators will get free licenses once we start distributing Butler 5 licenses; but still, this decision meant we had to raise the bar some more. If we're going to make people pay a shareware fee, the product should be worth it.
That's why we can't give you a Butler 5 beta today. We're aiming high, and we're determined to shoot high, so there's still a lot to do in terms of user interface and underlying technology improvements. Some tasks are easy yet time-consuming (e.g., commissioning new, larger icons to replace all those old 16x16 pixels icons), and others are just hard to get right (e.g., redesigning Butler's configuration window to make current Quicksilver users feel more at home). In fact, we even decided to stop working on Butler 5 for a while in order to complete and release another application named Leech first, just to make sure we wouldn't run into funding problems while working on Butler 5 as long as necessary. And that worked out really well.
There's another thing we learned from the abovementioned Witch transition, though, and that's trusting our loyal users. Witch's transition was a great success even though we didn't force anyone to update by means of a transient version or anything like that.
So let's ditch the whole "transient" concept. Today, we're releasing Butler 4.1.6, which features two noteworthy improvements:
But the most important change, as alluded to above, is that this version is no longer transient or deliberately limited in any other way. And it's still donationware. Once Butler 5 is ready, we're quite confident you'll want to upgrade.
No, we still can't edit signed applications on Mac OS X 10.5 without causing keychain problems (explanation), but Service Scrubber 1.1.5 features an improvement that I, personally, have been looking forward to pretty much ever since Service Scrubber was released — a serious icon.
Granted, this may seem like a nonrelevant problem to some of you, but the old preliminary icon was never meant to stay; and it has bugged me for years. So I'm deeply grateful to Lars Herrmann for creating the icon I had always envisioned.
The other improvement in this version is a French localization overhaul by Ronald Leroux. And speaking of Ronald — being donationware, this doesn't really apply to Service Scrubber; but if French is your primary language, and if you're about to buy one of our shareware applications (i.e., Leech, Witch, or yFlicks), you should definitely check out Lingua Franca for localization news. And once you're there, consider using their "Buy Now" buttons, where available. That way, Ronald will get his share of the sale, compensating for his hard work on all those French localizations.
This time, it's Witch's turn to get a French localization. Moreover, version 2.0.1 sports a shiny new icon by Lars Herrmann and makes sure KeyCue no longer interferes with Witch's windows selector.
As promised, here's yFlicks 3.3.2, which fixes a bug that resulted in a hanging yflickscrawler process and, consequently, non-working preview image creation with QuickTime 7.5 installed. This version also works around a bug in Apple's URL loading frameworks that resulted in long download connection delays under certain circumstances (background info for fellow developers: NSURLConnections based on NSMutableURLRequests don't obey their timeout setting, so we had to emulate that time-out).
And last but not least, yFlicks now speaks French. Merci beaucoup, Ronald!
Update: Just in case some of you French users are wondering why the sidebar categories ("Library", "Smart Groups", etc.) aren't renamed to French automatically in this version — that's because they are entirely under your thumb once you've created a library. Just rename those categories to whatever you prefer.
Leech 1.1.3 is a mere bugfix release: Firstly, it fixes a Firefox integration bug that kept temporary download files from getting moved to their final location under certain conditions. And secondly, it removes stray temporary download files that remained visible after handing Camino downloads off to Leech.
On a side note, we have several other smallish updates coming up in the next few days, including one that solves a yFlicks/QuickTime 7.5 issue a lot of users have run into during the past few days. Thanks for your patience.
Yesterday, we were alerted to a web site that made us feel flattered: See, we have been using a black-and-white version of Leech's icon as a generic icon for all downloads on our site for a while. In fact, we started doing that even before Leech was released.
It turns out there are other developers who want to help establish Leech as a synonym for downloading: GafMedia, developers of LinkLite, didn't really ask us for permission before using our icon for their download link and copying our general download box layout, but nevertheless, we do like it.
So if you're a Mac developer looking for a download icon, feel free to use ours. For additional bonus points, tell your users they should use Leech for downloading. And we'd prefer it if you could keep the green highlight color, instead of changing it to a graphite-y one like GafMedia did.
Here's a screenshot — just in case GafMedia goes offline some day. Now if only we knew why that LinkLite page's HTML source includes Coda's download dialog.
Update: GafMedia has since replaced the download icon on LinkLite's product page and — most importantly — apologized for using Leech's icon without asking for permission first. We appreciate that. Regardless, we're still willing to let others use that icon. We'd just like to be notified first.
Fulfilling two more major user requests, Leech 1.1.2 adds Firefox integration and Growl support.
Firefox integration is based on Giorgio Maone's excellent FlashGot Firefox/download manager hub. FlashGot is a free Mozilla/Firefox/Flock/Thunderbird extension (compatible with Netscape too), meant to handle single and massive ("all" and "selection") downloads with several external download managers. A version that supports Leech will be released as early as today. And once you have installed both Leech 1.1.2 and that new FlashGot version, you'll be able to choose Leech as your Firefox download manager from FlashGot's preferences.
As far as Growl support ist concerned, Growl will notice Leech when you launch Leech 1.1.2 for the first time. And once Leech has appeared in Growl's preferences pane, you can configure it just like any other Growl-enabled application.
And by the way: Both FlashGot and Growl are donationware projects. If you use them regularly, please consider supporting ongoing development with your donation.
Here's another minor Leech update, which fulfills three more user requests — namely host-specific limiting of concurrent downloads; automatic clearing of the history when Leech quits; and private downloading, which means anonymized download names in Leech's main window and omitting downloads from the history.
And today is the perfect day to give Leech a try, by the way, because it's macZOT's promo of the day. So get Leech now and save 48% — this offer is only valid today.
After a week of gathering feedback for the initial release, here's Leech 1.1. We're pretty sure you'll like this update.
The most important improvement, in our opinion, is browser integration. Before releasing Leech 1.0, we weren't sure if doing this was actually a good idea, because Safari doesn't have any official plug-in interface, which makes each and every Safari enhancment a more or less dangerous hack. But your feedback was quite clear, so we changed our collective mind and implemented seamless integration for Safari, Camino, and OmniWeb by means of a SIMBL plug-in. If you're using things like PithHelmet or 1password, SIMBL is already installed on your Mac. And we certainly made an effort to make this as failure-safe as possible. So go ahead, enable browser integration from within Leech, and all your browser downloads will be handed off to Leech automatically.
Further improvements are a rule system to define individual download folders as well as applications to open complete downloads based on a given download's file type and host; a searchable downloads history I'm particularly proud of; various minor improvements and bugfixes; and a French localization.
Oh, and if you have been using another download manager up to now, check out our "Switch!" offer on Leech's product page.
While working on browser integration for Leech (the update will be available as early as next week), I came across a solution for another issue that's been bugging me for years: unsolicited JavaScript window resizing in Safari. So if you — like me — despise web sites that think they know your browser window partialities better than you do, have a look at this little hack named Safari Size Guardian.
In other news, tomorrow is Mother's Day in quite a lot of countries all over the planet. If you're still looking for a gift, have a look at macZOT's Mother's Day Sixpack, which includes TubiTunes. (You can also buy that SixPack for yourself. We won't tell.)
We've hinted at this before, and now it's here: Check out Leech, our new download manager.
Leech gives you complete control over your downloads. You can queue, pause and resume downloads, download from password-protected servers and store your passwords in your system-wide, secure keychain. And you won't have to worry about downloads that were disrupted by a crashing browser ever again.
Have a look at Leech's shiny new product page for more info.
While preparing for the release of an entirely new application next week, we realized that this site's current homepage layout had reached its limits. So we're changing it, and in doing so, we're taking the opportunity to give easier access to some minor projects, which we call baubleries.
What are these baubleries? Key Codes has always been accessible from our homepage, and we've blogged about Displaperture and the more or less obsolete Menu Bar Tint a few times.
But you may have never heard about Open-With Manager before — despite the fact that this little critter is roughly three years old. So if you're interested in a utility that lets you edit the list of file types a given application thinks it can open (which, in turn, influences the Finder's "Open with" context menu and the application's drag & drop behavior in the Dock), check it out. Just make sure you've read the warning at the bottom of the product page before using it.
We have sent out Witch licenses to all donators we found in our database. So if you have donated for Witch but haven't received your license yet, let us know. We know that some of you are still missing out, because some of those license e-mails bounced back.
Fun fact: Witch made more money on its first shareware day than it did during all those donationware years. I guess it's safe to say that — while being a beautiful concept in theory — donationware isn't exactly the best way to get rich.
A funny thing happened yesterday, when yFlicks was promoted on macZOT: yFlicks drew so much attention, it killed macZOT's bandwidth. In fact, they are still struggling to stay online. And as a result, some of you couldn't get the rebate.
What do we do about this? We do an instant replay. Get yFlicks now — the 50% rebate is available for another day. And don't forget that buying yFlicks means getting TubiTunes for free.
There's a problem with Witch: In terms of usage, it's a simple utility; and there's not a lot of spiffy new features we would want to add to its straightforward functionality. But under the hood, things change. There's a lot of things you can or even have to do to make sure Witch remains reliable when faced with future versions of Mac OS X. That's why Witch 2.0 may seem like a small step to you, but judging from the developer's point of view, it's not.
Now, you know how these things go: Whenever someone tells you how he is working really hard for something, there's a certain chance he'll end up asking you for money. And that's exactly what I'm going to do today — after having thought about it four months.
Witch has been distributed as donationware for years, and it was a great time. I loved how users who just couldn't afford paying more than $2 were able to donate those $2 and feel good about it. I know I always did. But in the long run, it doesn't really work. If I'm supposed to keep Witch up to date, it will have to be worthwhile; and donationware doesn't cut it.
Too many users misunderstand my idea of donationware as freeware, and this problem is aggravated by the fact that most Mac news sites and software update providers aren't willing to make a difference between donationware and freeware. I've argued with some of them for years, to no avail. And I understand their point of view. Donationware is hardly an unequivocal term; and if I were to sell a magazine or make a news site successful, I'd probably prefer to allure customers with huge freeware collections, too.
So let's get rid of the uncertainty that always surrounds donationware. Witch 2.0 is shareware, and you're expected to pay €9.95 if you plan on using it regularly — unless you've already donated for Witch, that is. For us, appreciating past donations from our most loyal supporters is a question of honor.
We'll start sending out Witch licenses to those who have supported Witch in the past during the next few days. But if you can't wait, or if you get the feeling we might have forgotten to add you to our list, feel free to drop us a message. For example, I remember receiving some donations via snail mail years ago, and I'm not sure if I can still attribute those to e-mail addresses.
Whew. Now, what are the actual changes in Witch 2.0 — apart from that fancy new license field in Witch's preference pane? As I've said, you won't even notice most of the changes right now, and in addition to those under-the-hood things, there's one feature we really wanted to add, but couldn't: full spaces support. Witch appears in all of your spaces now, but it remains agnostic of which space a given window is in. We just haven't found a reliable way to gain that piece of information yet — it's as if the mighty Apple doesn't want applications to know which space they live in.
But there's also good news: We've added shortcuts for jumping to windows directly (see "Behavior" > "Windows List" > "Show shortcut badges"). So if you want to activate the 7th window in Witch's list, type "6", and you're there. (We're starting with "0" for the current window.)
And we're very happy to report that we've fixed one of the meanest bugs ever — namely the one that sometimes garbled the windows list's sorting order when sorting by window activity, a.k.a. "the iTerm bug".
We have four updates for you today, and we'll divide these into two blog entries, because the fourth one needs more detailed explaining.
Let's start with these two: Just in time to meet today's 50%-off macZOT promo, both yFlicks and TubiTunes are now capable of downloading the higher-quality MPEG-4 file for a given movie from YouTube, if available. Other than that, we've just squashed some bugs — including a particularly embarrassing one: TubiTunes's automatic update checker didn't actually check for updates automatically.
What are the other two updates? Desktop Curtain is now ready to deal with multiple screens and spaces. And Witch 2.0 is detailed here.
There are quite a number of improvements in yFlicks 3.3: First of all, our eye candy department wants you to know that you can now browse your movies in coverflow mode (Mac OS X 10.5 only, sorry). And if you're using yFlicks's Usher mode to have Front Row display your movies in a hierarchical fashion, you will be pleased to hear that yFlicks can now include your iTunes movies in its library. Apple doesn't want us to play back movies you've bought from the iTunes store, but you will be able to organize those movies in your smart groups nevertheless.
In other news, we've added something we had been promising since yFlicks 1.0: more conversion/export options. You're no longer restricted to exporting to MPEG-4, and converting a movie no longer blocks yFlicks. We've also improved the web video downloading mechanism quite significantly. Downloading those movies is now much less likely to fail, as we've added something we like to call the generic web media detector. Said detector not only makes yFlicks work with a lot more video sites than before, it also supports things like downloading MP3 files from MySpace, for instance. And once you've downloaded a web video, you can now have yFlicks convert that video to something your iPhone/iPod can work with automatically.
In fact, we've come to the conclusion that yFlicks's downloading and conversion functionality might also appeal to users who don't want to organize those web videos in yFlicks — e.g., because they're doing it in iTunes. So we created a spin-off, which focuses on just that: downloading and converting movies. Say hello to TubiTunes, the easiest-to-use web video downloader and movie converter ever.
And if you think that TubiTunes is close to being a light-weight download manager, you're perfectly right. It would be ridiculously easy to develop TubiTunes into a download manager, and if we ever did this, even the application icon would be quite similar to TubiTunes's icon. We'll see.
Background info for fellow developers: When implementing coverflow in yFlicks, I was faced with a challenge that made my head ache for a while. I wanted this to be based on CoreAnimation, and I wanted yFlicks to still run on Mac OS X 10.4. What I've eventually come up with is a plug-in bundle named PMFlowView, which is only loaded and used when yFlicks runs on Mac OS X 10.5. It communicates with the actual application by means of a protocol that will sound very familiar to anyone who's ever used a NSTableView, and since it's a stand-alone component, it can be used with virtually any application. If this sounds appealing to you, have a look at PMFlowView's essential header file; and if you're interested in using PMFlowView in one of your own projects, feel free to contact us.
We know most users weren't exactly dying to get this update, but we've been asked for it, so here you go: Key Codes 1.0.2 is still a very, very basic key code explorer application that comes in handy when developing Mac OS X applications. The news is: It's a universal binary now.
Why is there a version 2.0 of an application you've never even heard of before? Here's why: This is the successor of the batch rename utility with the lamest name ever — File List. And File List didn't just have a name that wasn't much help in figuring out what the application actually did. It also had an outdated user interface, it didn't run natively on Intel processors, and it had an icon that was actually a scaled screenshot.
So we fixed all these issues, and now that we're done, we think we just created the best file renamer ever. Meet Name Mangler.
It's about time we made our little screenshot helper/tidiness impersonator a universal binary that runs natively on Intel processors. Moreover, Desktop Curtain 1.0.1 has been adapted to Mac OS X 10.5's new default desktop picture.
A lot of applications have little overlay windows that control the application's behavior when in fullscreen mode. Take, for instance, QuickTime Player's fullscreen playback controls or the Finder's slideshow controls. By default, they pop up at the lower center of your screen, but you can move them with your mouse.
The odd thing is: Once you've moved them (e.g., by accident), there's virtually no way to re-center them. And you can move them off screen, at least partially. Sure, there are a lot of reasons that justify moving a standard window partially off screen, and I won't even discuss them here, because I'm lazy. But I don't think these reasons apply to little overlay windows with just a few controls — windows that are typically the only visible window of their kind, displayed in front of some kind of fullscreen content.
I may be more obsessive than most users in this respect, but if I want to center a window, I want it centered, not just approximately centered. So to me, it has always been obvious that said overlay windows should snap to the screen's center (or at least the center of the screen's abscissa) when moved near there. And it's equally obvious that they should snap to the screen's edges. If you do it that way, there's an additonal benefit: Most of these overlay windows have rounded corners; and if you snap them to the screen edges (or corners, for that matter), you can adjust the window's corners according to the window's position, because a rounded lower right window corner doesn't make much sense if it's snug agains the screen's lower right corner.
That's how yFlicks behaves. And Butler's little status window — the one you see when pressing a hot key, for instance — has been snapping to certain screen positions for years as well. But the thought that I may be overlooking the elephant in the room keeps haunting me, because I can't find the answer to one simple question:
Why doesn't Apple do it?
If you're like us, you have some of your movies on your computer's boot drive, while others are located on an external mass storage device. Up to now, that was a problem, because there wasn't an elegant way to organize all those movies in one library while keeping the benefits of having yFlicks organize your movie files automatically.
yFlicks 3.2 introduces supplementary library folders that help you distribute your movies across several volumes while still having them organized automatically. And it hides those movies that are currently not available as soon as you unmount your external volumes. Re-mount them, and yFlicks shows all those movies again.
Apart from the usual maintenance stuff (fixed downloading from YouTube and others), there are a lot more improvements in this version, and most of them can be classified as user interface enhancements. Have a look at this list for the details.
Update: The original yFlicks 3.2 had an issue with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", which we've just fixed. So if you were experiencing a problem with starting yFlicks under Tiger, please download again and accept our sincere apologies for having overlooked this one.
We've got two bug-fix updates for you today:
Firstly, Service Scrubber 1.1.4 no longer lets you edit signed applications, as introduced by Mac OS X 10.5. This restriction effectively limits Service Scrubber to non-Apple applications and services; but unfortunately, it's a necessary step — at least as of now.
Here's why: Service Scrubber works by editing an application's resources, and those signed applications refuse to play nice with your key chain, which is used for storing your passwords, once their resources have been edited by a 3rd-party application, such as Service Scrubber. So if you're using Service Scrubber on services made available by Apple's Mail application, for instance, Mail might lose the ability to access your stored mailbox passwords or store new passwords.
If you're still on Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier, this restriction does not apply, as there aren't any signed applications there. And if you're willing to take the risk of editing certain signed applications on Mac OS X 10.5, let us know. There is a way to circumvent the "non-signed applications only" restriction built into Service Scrubber 1.1.4, but we're not sure yet whether releasing it is worth the risk of having some users detach their applications from the key chain, so to speak, without being fully aware of the consequences.
The second update is much easier to explain: yFlicks 3.1.1 fixes an issue that made downloading from international YouTube sites — such as de.youtube.com — impossible. End of story.
You have been asking for this for years; and here it is: the Many Tricks Forum.
Now, you might realize that this forum lives at a subdomain, namely help.manytricks.com. Why did we call it that? We don't necessarily think of this forum as another means to help users solve problems they might encounter with our software. We do that by e-mail most of the time, and it works fine.
We're talking about the inverse here: We'd like to ask you to help us improve our products by sharing your ideas and disussing them with your fellow users.
This will make it easier for us to evaluate what features are really needed; and sometimes, you might even realize that your request has already been complied with. For example, you wouldn't believe how often we hear something along the lines of "I didn't know Butler could do that".
So by opening this forum, we're asking you a favor. We're asking you to participate and share your insight. In return, we are going to give away one software license for free to an active forum member each month. Come in!
There are a lot of improvements in yFlicks 3.1, and you can read all about them here; but let's focus on two things we're especially thrilled with for the sake of brevity:
Firstly, you can now have yFlicks treat a sequence of movies as one composite movie by selecting them and choosing "Merge Movie Sequence..." from the "File" menu. This makes dealing with multi-part movies, as present in vast quantities on YouTube, for instance, much easier and more elegant.
And seconly, sometimes you encounter a movie that has black borders around the actual movie frames. Apart from consuming screen estate, these don't serve any purpose, so yFlicks now lets you get rid of them by choosing "Crop Visible Area..." from the "Display" menu.
This version defers the transient Butler's expiration date until July 1, 2008 — please read this blog entry if you're wondering why Butler is currently in a transient state.
Simply put, we need some more time to get a public beta version of Butler 5 out of the door; and we don't want to force you to check for a new transient version every other week until then. That's why we have chosen a rather distant expiry date.
Oh, and by the way: Have a happy new year's eve!
yFlicks 3.0.3 squashes just one little bug, namely a display glitch in the English localization's "Advanced" preferences tab.
This is just a small update to yFlicks, but it contains a lot of things we know you have been waiting for. First and foremost, it reduces the delays you've learned to hate when you were adding multiple files to your yFlicks library, and it does so dramatically. Movie metadata — such as preview images and movie durations — are now cached by a separate little helper process we call the "yflickscrawler", so you don't have to wait until yFlicks has digested all those new movies before doing anything else anymore.
There is also a new overlay slider control for movie previews, giving you the possibility to skim entire movies with minmal effort — without ever really having to open them.
And there are a lot more little improvments, but this one is kinda important for us, since we're native German speakers and we've had a lot of friends asking for this: yFlicks now has a complete German localization.
We're fixing a few bugs in both Butler and yFlicks today. Most importantly, we have solved the most unnerving Butler bug ever, which usually made Butler crash on Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" while editing a configuration item in the main window's Inspector. Thanks to everyone who helped us with this — it took us weeks to even get the slightest idea of what was going on.
We'd also like to thank those who helped us squash a couple of yFlicks bugs, including a smart group sorting issue that gave us reason to improve the library's behind-the-scenes mechanisms quite significantly.
And just in case you haven't noticed: We're back with a fast and reliable webserver after living through a webserver nightmare last week, including the day yFlicks 3.0 was released. We're not particularly keen on experiencing that kind of thrill again any time soon. And we are really sorry for any web site and e-mail hiccups that occured during the transition.
Our main webserver appears to be dead, and consequently, we're in the middle of moving to a new server/provider. Meanwhile, we're redirecting you to manytricks.de/fallback; and we would like to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.
The new yFlicks 3 doesn't just let you view and arrange movies in static groups — its versatile tags feature lets you categorize your movies any way you want. You can even tag your movie automatically by querying Amazon's online movie database, which gives you the additional benefit of having the corresponding DVD cover art downloaded automatically. And once you've done so, creating smart groups based on your tags and subdividing those smart groups by tag values will let you browse your movie library by Genre, Actor, Director, MPAA Rating, or Year, for instance.
And if you're a Front Row fan, you'll love the fact that usher mode lets you access the full complexity of your yFlicks library via Front Row.
So head over to MUPromo and get it. It's available there with a 40% introductory rebate. Only today.
Yesterday, Steve Miner published a method to make the menu bar in Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" opaque, non-translucent or non-transparent — whatever you prefer to call it.
While a lot of Leopard users will probably not even see the point in this, we are very happy to finally have a solution for one of our pet peeves with the Leopard. As some of you may know, we had even created our own little application for achieving the same thing a few months ago, but the method it employed didn't work in the final, official Leopard.
Turns out you just have to set a certain environment variable to get rid of the translucent menu bar. However, there's one thing about this we didn't like: Once you've done so, the menu bar is very white, and it looks very plain.
So we revived that aforementioned application of ours, tweaked it a little, changed it's name, and here we are: Menu Bar Tint draws a grayscale color gradient over your menu bar, making your newly opaque menu bar feel more at home among all the other user interface elements in Mac OS X. And if you feel like going wild with colors, you're free to do so, too.
This version of Butler fixes all issues with Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" we are currently aware of. Most importantly, fast user switching and related functionality are working once again — a user management change in Leopard had caused most of the Leopard issues users have been experiencing, although it hasn't always been obvious.
Moreover, selecting menu items that are also submenu parents is back to working as expected (where applicable, e.g., menu items that represent a file system folder); and we've fixed several interface glitches.
So why do we call this a transient release? Why does it expire on January 1, 2008? Actually, we are working on Butler 5, which will run on Mac OS X 10.5 only and employ some of the exciting new features in Mac OS X that we haven't been able to use up to now, since we've always supported Mac OS X versions as early as 10.2.8 with Butler.
And once this new version is released, we'd prefer a clear cut between Butler 4.1.2 (Mac OS X 10.2.8 through 10.4.x) and Butler 5 (Mac OS X 10.5 and newer). We'll have to say more about this soon.
As explained here, the very first Leopard hack, namely Non-Transparent Menu Bar, was forcefully retired somewhat prematurely. So we recycled its source code and turned it into another nostalgia hack.
See, the new Mac OS X doesn't draw rounded screen corners anymore. Most users won't notice, others will be happy about this change, but some might miss that cuddly CRT aura those rounded corners emitted.
So if you'd rather still have rounded corners, have a look at Displaperture, the little tool that lets you retain your beloved rounded screen corners. You can even determine those corners' radii, and you can pick the corners you want rounded — including the bottom ones.
Now that the new cat is out of the bag, it's time to have a look at how our applications cope with it. Here's a preliminary overview:
Butler
• has issues with its built-in Fast User Switching replacement
• doesn't draw its configuration subheaders correctly
Both issues will be addressed during the next few days.
Desktop Curtain
• doesn't cover the part of the wallpaper that "shines through" the menu bar
Not sure how to fix this, cf. Non-Transparent Menu Bar.
Non-Transparent Menu Bar
• simply put: doesn't work
We did actually have reason to believe that this would work during earlier beta stages of Mac OS X 10.5. However, the final Leopard's menu bar is opaque, and instead of letting the background shine through, it draws a blurred copy of your wallpaper. We hate to waste source code, though, so we thought of something else we could do with this — see our next blog entry.
File List, Key Codes, Service Scrubber, Witch, yFlicks
• all of these seem to work fine
However, if you happen to encounter any Leopard-related bug that we didn't find, please don't hesitate to let us know. Thanks!
Admit it: You're dying to get a Butler shirt. Well, at least we were; and that's why we decided to configure and order a couple of these at CafePress. Once we had done so, we thought to ourselves: The Butler icon does have its fans, so why not let them wear their favorite utility's icon, too?
Thus, we proudly present Many Tricks Apparel, our own little apparel/mugs/whatnot store.
Oh, and those product prizes? They are CafePress's base prizes — we don't earn jack from anything sold through CafePress. But we would feel incredibly honored if you actually considered wearing our special little guy.
After Macworld's Rob Griffiths had weighed in on Mac OS X 10.5's menu bar and mentioned Non-Transparent Menu Bar (NTMB) in passing, we learned two things from readers' feedback:
So here we are, offering you yet another version of a product that will hopefully be rendered unnecessary once the operating system it's written for is released. With this new version, you can build your own color gradient for NTMB's menu bar mask (think rainbow!) as well as control the menu bar's opacity depending on mouse position. Also fixes a potential issue with full-screen applications.
And we have even created a preliminary product page this time.
Apple ships a remote control with most of their computers. With only six buttons the Apple Remote is the ultimate in simple sophistication. The standard functionality, however, is limited to controlling just a couple of applications. Sofa Control breaks this limit. With Sofa Control you are able to control any application on your Mac and trigger whatever actions you like.
Now you might be wondering why we would recommend an application we're not officially affiliated with. Here's why: About a year ago, Sofa Control's head developer, Martin Kahr, did something Apple forgot to do: He provided a framework named Remote Control Wrapper that made it ridiculously easy for 3rd-party applications to interface with the Apple Remote. So when we started thinking about adding remote control support to yFlicks, the decision to use Martin's framework was more or less a no-brainer. It was rock-solid, it was elegant, and it was free.
However, we encountered one issue that — in our humble opinion — was worth fixing: There wasn't any mechanism for managing situations where several applications using Martin's framework would strive for access to the remote control. When we contacted Martin about this, we were delighted by his open-minded response and his willingness to work this out.
And that's what we did. Together, we came up with a beautiful solution for this kind of race condition. And this solution doesn't even require any additional work from 3rd-party developers. They just have to update their applications to the newest Remote Control Wrapper version.
Yesterday, Martin released said version, along with Sofa Control 2.1, which — hardly surprisingly — uses the Remote Control Wrapper framework, too. So now you can have yFlicks and Sofa Control work seamlessly together, because actually, that new Remote Control Wrapper version has been built into yFlicks since yFlicks 2.0.
Now that John Gruber has linked to Non-Transparent Menu Bar, this little proof of concept has become fairly popular. And believe it or not: We even received a bug report from the ever-vigilant Daniel Jalkut — or, to put in his words, a "minor tweak" that improves the z-level positioning of our transparency killer. (Note to self: Don't just copy code from another project. Think about it first.)
So here's a little update (source) to Non-Transparent Menu Bar, which also makes it more usable by turning it into a background application that doesn't clutter your dock.
First of all, we'd just like to say thank you! yFlicks was quite a success with the macZOT community. When we negotiated this offer, macZOT gave us an estimate of the number of licenses they thought we would be able to sell, based on their usual sales figures and consisting of a minimum and a maximum number.
We sold almost three times the maximum estimate.
And macZOT buyers are no different from our other customers, inasmuch as they ask for tag support a lot. You really seem to be waiting for this — waiting for a way to store a movie's director and its genre, for instance, in your movie library. So we thought we might as well let you know that we're working on tags right now. And there's a reason why we are taking our time for this: We want to do it right; and we think we do. In fact, this could easily turn into the most intelligent tagging mechanism you have ever seen — most notably when combined with smart groups.
And who knows... There may be an even bigger picture to this.
If you have been pondering buying yFlicks, our movie viewer/manager, today might be the perfect day to do just that. We're offering yFlicks at a special introductory price of just $11.95 on macZOT; so head on over there and get it.
As always with macZOT, this offer is only valid for one day.
Here's a snippet from a message we sent to Panic on the very day Coda was released: “So let me be the first to congratulate on that User Interface Apple Design Award I'm sure Coda will win.”
Congratulations to all those other winners and runner-ups, too. Well deserved.
Here's a little treat for fellow developers — if you're like Michael Tsai or us, the first thing Leopard's new desktop made you think about was this: How do I get rid of that ridiculous semi-transparent look of the menu bar?
Look no further, it's a no-brainer (source).
To demonstrate what Non-Transparent Menu Bar does on Tiger systems as well, it covers the menu bar by default. Choose "Toggle Level" from the application menu to put it where it actually belongs. And if you're actually thinking about using this, you'll probably want to change its LSUIElement value to hide it from the dock.
Update: Non-Transparent Menu Bar 1.1 does that LSUIElement stuff for you.
yFlicks 2.0.1 adds support for downloading videos from DailyMotion and CollegeHumor. And now that Mac OS X 10.5 has been demoed in its final form, we thought we might as well throw in an optional Leopard-style main window behavior/texture that changes its hue depending on whether yFlicks is the frontmost application.
Also improves context menus and fixes two minor, yet pesky bugs that prompted us to release this update as soon as possible — see the changes log for more details.
yFlicks 2.0 is such a huge step forward, we were actually considering calling it yFlicks 3.0.
Seriously: There are more improvements than we can even remember right now, but the two most important things are full support for the Apple Remote — including access to all of your library just by hitting the "Menu" button — and the option to have yFlicks keep your library organized. The latter is quite similar to what iTunes does with your music: Name changes as well as your library's folder structure are automatically reflected on the file system level when you enable this feature. If you're interested in a more extensive list of changes, look here.
Oh, and by the way: yFlicks 2.0 is a free upgrade for registered users.
yFlicks 1.1 adds smart groups, which let you filter all of your library's contents by criteria such as name, rating, and date added. We're also supporting downloads from two more video communities now, namely SevenLoad and ClipFish.
Update: There was a small typo in the original source code for yFlicks 1.1 that prevented you from deleting groups. Just download yFlicks 1.1 once more if you're experiencing this problem.
We are proud to present two quick tour videos, giving you a basic idea of how Butler and yFlicks work, respectively. These videos have been created by loyal users and — dare we say — good friends of ours, which makes us feel deeply grateful.
And just so you know: If you're interested in pointing out what you like most about our products in a similar fashion, just drop us a line. We'll be more than happy to link to your videos.
yFlicks 1.0.2 mainly improves drag & drop support. For instance, yFlicks now generates groups automatically whenever you add file system folders to its library, representing subfolder hierarchies as nested groups where appropriate.
Moreover, you can now define seperate sorting criteria for each group. These criteria are also reflected in the library view on the left hand side of yFlicks' main window.
Although this site has been up for a few weeks, most of our applications were still hosted on Peter's personal web site. That's no longer the case, and we 're quite happy to have completed our relocation.
There's a technical implication to this, too. If you were still monitoring Peter's web log (i.e., the respective RSS feed) for software updates, there's no point in doing so any longer. You'll want to switch to this one, instead.
yFlicks 1.0.1 adds support for MyVideo, a German online video community, and displays a download status when downloading online videos from YouTube, for instance. Also fixes two minor bugs.
yFlicks is not just a movie player. Go see for yourself.
So we did it. We've created a new site. We've created a new application — see next posting. And we did it on time.
Now, in case you're wondering what Many Tricks is: It's a new project where Peter Maurer, of Butler/Textpander/Witch fame, and Alexander Schön, an aspiring new developer, join forces to provide you with even better Mac software. Here's more information about us.
All of the previously available applications will be moved to our new server within the next few days. And don't worry — there won't be any sudden license changes. We'll try to make this transition as smooth as possible.
