If you often find yourself downloading even a handful of files each day, or you switch browsers like you switch apps, a real download manager like Many Tricks’s Leech might be a better companion for your Internet travels.

We’ll try to address David’s minor gripes in future updates, and then maybe we can earn that elusive fifth mouse!

You can read those two sentences again on the official release notes page, but really, there’s no need—that’s really all that’s there!

You can get the update via Witch’s in-app updater, or download the full program from Witch’s product page.

Running the business

• iChat (free with Mac OS X): We rely on iChat extensively. Most of our written communication is via iChat (so we both have transcripts enabled, to record what we type), and we use screen sharing (to work through the product design and implementation process) and video chat (so we can occasionally speak instead of type). Without iChat or something like it, our time and distance separation would make running the business much tougher.
• Dropbox (free; we get more storage space if you use this link): With the distance between us, we needed some easy way to move files back and forth. Dropbox fits the bill perfectly, and makes it super easy for us to share our files back and forth—any changes made to the shared folder are automatically duplicated to all our Macs. It doesn’t get much easier than that. We wonder how they can afford to make it a free service, though.
• The Hit List ($50): We use The Hit List (THL) to track all of our to dos for current and future apps, and for the business itself. While THL isn’t a true multi-user app, we’ve sort of solved that by using Dropbox: we moved the THL support files into a folder on Dropbox, and now we can both see and work with the same set of data—just not at the same time. So far, this has worked really well. We like THL’s elegant interface, and its support for tagging lets us manage a number of complex mini-projects with ease.
• E-junkie ($ varies): The provider of our online shopping cart. While Rob thinks they have a less-than-ideal name (Peter of course finds that name hilarious, but then, he also thought “Textpander” was funny), they provide a great service, and their system is very flexible and easy to work with.
• PayPal and Google Checkout (% commission): These two companies handle payment processing (i.e. credit card approvals) after a user places an order with the E-junkie online store. Most of our customers (over 80%) use PayPal, and it seems they process orders more quickly than does Google Checkout.

From Rob’s point of view:

• FileMaker Pro 11 ($ varies): One of the issues I faced when joining Many Tricks was incomplete historical customer data. To make sure we better tracked our sales activity going forward, I created a FileMaker Pro customer database. I hadn’t used FileMaker extensively in nearly a decade, but my basic skills came back pretty easily. The database is manually updated (via an automated script) with data I download from E-junkie. (This database does not contain credit card information; it stores only the basic data you provide when purchasing an app. It also resides solely on my machine, and is not stored online anywhere, including Dropbox.)
• Microsoft Excel 2008 ($ varies): To keep Peter in the loop about our sales activities, we have an online sales report that summarizes activity by day, by product, and by payment processor, and graphs sales activity in each of our main products. This report is created automatically by Excel, using a script in FileMaker Pro that exports the data, then opens and updates the relevant Excel spreadsheets. When the script tells Excel to save the sheets, a setting in Excel also updates the local web page versions of those sheets. (No, we’re not giving you a link for this one.)
• AppleScript, Folder Actions, and shell scripting: The combination of these tools is used to automatically update the online sales report. A Folder Action watches the folder where I save the sales reports, and runs an AppleScript when it sees a newly-added file. The AppleScript uses a shell script (which, in turn, uses scp) to upload the sales report pages to our web site. When done, the AppleScript deletes the files in the folder, so that it’s ready for the next save. (Folder Actions can’t watch for changes to existing files in a folder, just files being added to a folder. So I keep the folder empty until a new report is ready.)
• rsync (free with Mac OS X): We use rysnc to back up our online presence. Using rsync and a cron task, our web files (HTML, PHP, etc.) and SQL databases are backed up to my machine three times a day. From there, Time Machine backs them up onto another drive, and they’re copied to a FireWire drive for offsite storage once a week. I feel pretty confident that if we ever suffer a catastrophic hosting failure, we’ll be able to get back up and running quickly with minimal data loss.

General Mac tools

• TextExpander ($35): We use TextExpander to auto-expand various snippets of text, including stock replies to certain email inquiries and inserting HTML snippets in our web files. If you do much writing at all, a text expansion tool is highly recommended. If you need help choosing one, some guy named Rob Griffiths, who used to write for Macworld, recently reviewed and compared four such apps. (Peter is somewhat emotionally attached to TextExpander, so it should be obvious what his favorite among these is.)
• TextWrangler (free): When either of us is not working on something in Coda, and we just want to edit some text, we’ll usually fire up TextWrangler. Rob’s text processing needs are relatively simple now, and Peter’s text processing needs have always been that way, so TextWrangler supports everything we need out of a text editor.

From Rob’s point of view:

• Data Backup ($59) and Time Machine (free with Mac OS X): I use Data Backup to run the weekly backups to my offsite FireWire drive (it comes home once a week for copying), and use Time Machine for near-real-time backups of Many Tricks’ data.
• Growl (donations welcome): While we include Growl support in some of our apps, I also personally use Growl to notify me of activities in key capps. Transmit, Coda, Dropbox, and iChat (via the Chax plug-in), for instance, all support Growl. So when Peter updates the files in our Dropbox folder, my Growl alert pops up and lets me know there are new files there. Growl is so good I keep expecting Apple to bundle something like it directly with the OS.

From Peter’s point of view:

• Finder (free with Mac OS X): Every Mac user is a Finder user, too, of course (except for the Path Finder orthodox, that is), so why am I mentioning the Finder explicitly? I’m using the Finder for a host of things Rob tends to do in a more automated fashion. For instance, I currently do most of my backups manually, because even after years of testing, I just haven’t ever been able to find a backup solution that felt as reliable as copying something by hand. See next paragraph for the exception that proves the rule.
• SuperDuper! ($27.95): This little utility is incredibly useful for backing up entire drives. It’s a pity it doesn’t do folder-to-folder synchronizing, too.

Beyond the tools we’ve listed here, there are many other programs (screenshot tools, screen movie tools, image creation and editing tools, etc.) we use, but the ones we’ve chosen to list here are the biggies. We hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes tour, and maybe you found an app or two that might fit your needs, too.

Given our small size and geographic separation, we need to work efficiently individually, and doubly so during those few hours each day when our schedules overlap (typically from about 5:00am to 12:00pm, west coast USA time). So what tools do we use to keep in touch, to manage our web site, and to run the business? Keep reading for a behind-the-scenes look at the apps that keep Many Tricks humming.

As this post turned out much longer than either of us expected, we’ve broken it into two parts. This first part covers the tools we use to create our apps and handle our online activities; the second part will discuss running the business side of the company and general Mac tools that aren’t directly related to any of the prior categories.

Here’s a look at the key programs we use to create our apps and manage our online presence. (Note that we don’t include our own apps on these lists, but both of us use them extensively, as you might guess.)

Creating our applications

From Peter’s point of view:

• Xcode (free): Write code, compile it, and tear your hair out because of errors you don’t understand—Xcode lets you do all of that, and it’s the development environment the vast majority of Mac/iPhone developers uses. I haven’t worked with any other IDE in years, so I don’t really know how it stacks up against other contemporary environments, but one thing I can say is that I really, honestly like Xcode. It’s quite successful at making a developer’s life as easy as possible, and Apple has improved Xcode steadily ever since Mac OS X saw the light of day. In my opinion, Xcode is an archetypical example of what’s great about Apple.
• Canvas (discontinued for Mac OS X): I try not to create icons anymore, because I’m just not that good at it, but whenever there’s an immediate need for doing vector graphics, I still fire up Canvas, which helped create the Butler and Name Mangler app icons, among others, in the past. This is the only major graphics application I ever really learnt to use, so it’s a pity they don’t make it for the Mac anymore. Like so many successful pieces of software, Canvas was first created for the Mac, and I remember the times when most of the Mac users I knew worked with Canvas on a daily basis. Eventually, though, Canvas’ original maker, Deneba, was acquired by ACD systems, and those guys just didn’t like the Mac that much, I guess. So I’ll have to switch to another app one day, but for now, I’m just glad Canvas X still runs on Mac OS X 10.6.
• GraphicConverter ($34.95): GraphicConverter is the swiss army knife of editing and converting image files on the Mac. It was the first Mac shareware app I became aware of when I started working on a Mac regularly during the Mac OS 8 days, and to this day, I find myself using it all the time, be it for quickly optimizing a scaled-down version of an icon, converting a PNG to a favicon, or any other of those minor graphics tasks one faces every day.
• DropDMG ($24) and DMGCanvas ($15): Both of these let you create those spiffy DMG disk image files that are the quasi-standard for distributing Mac software these days. Conceptually, they are quite different, and I’m an avid user of both of them, enjoying the fact that I have tailor-made tools for different tasks—such as packaging software for release (DMGCanvas) and archiving stuff (DropDMG)—at my disposal.
• Time (invaluable): While a solid Mac computer (or several of those, to be on the safe side) and some pieces of software are indispensable for developing, you’ll find that developers often just sit there, seemingly doing nothing while thinking about possible solutions to a problem, and possibly getting a little philosophical about it. So yes, state-of-the-art equipment is very important, but so is taking the time to come up with solutions you feel confident in.

Online activities

• Coda ($99): The Many Tricks web site is implemented on top of a very basic homebrewn content management system written in PHP, and it’s primarily coded and managed with Coda these days, after having been a Finder plus TextWrangler (see General Mac tools) plus Cyberduck (see below) project for years. We particularly like Coda’s ability to edit files on the server, its live previews, and the tabbed editing interface. Rob also uses Coda to create and edit all the help files for our apps.
• Safari and Firefox (both free): Peter prefers Safari, and Rob prefers Firefox, which is a pretty good combination—because we use the two dominant browsers on the Mac, we both work hard to make sure our web site works well in both of them. (We also test our site in the other major browsers, to make sure there aren’t any major issues.)

From Rob’s point of view:

• Trellis (free): Our support site, where you can submit requests for help, ask for new features, and browse our knowledge base, is powered by Trellis. While it’s not quite the perfect system (email submission/management of tickets would be great, and Peter is pretty much incompatible with its message editor) for our needs, it does about 80% of what I’d like it to do, and seems to be working relatively well.
• Transmit ($34): Sometimes I just need to get a bunch of files on the server. For those times, Transmit is my tool of choice. (For now, I’m sticking with Transmit 3.x, as I really dislike the interface in 4.x.)
• WordPress (free): Our blog is powered by WordPress, and I can’t say enough good things about it—from extensions to the most brain-dead-simple updates I’ve ever seen in a web app, WordPress makes it super easy to create and maintain a blog.

From Peter’s point of view:

• Cyberduck (donations welcome): Transferring files to and from our server after having edited them offline used to be Cyberduck’s job, and it did it both reliably and with a sense of user interface style that was unmatched by any other Mac FTP client for years. We don’t currently use Cyberduck for the reasons outlined above, but it is undoubtedly an important part of Many Tricks’ history.

Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow…

• Butler: Version 4.1.9 fixes a drag-to-Stack issue, and adds our in-app purchasing module. [release notes]
• Leech: Version 2.0.4 fixes a problem with ’shadow’ downloads (which were invisible, but definitely happening), as well as with duplicate downloads, from certain sites. [release notes]
• Name Mangler: Version 2.2.1 adds the in-app purchasing module, and solves a couple of issues that could arise when renaming both files and folders at the same time. [release notes]

With these releases, and last week’s release of Witch 3.5.1, things should quiet down a bit here (in terms of updates) as we return to work on Usher, Butler, and a project to be named later.

The default gradient is seen in the image at right, but you have (as you might expect from Many Tricks) full control over its appearance—including whether it’s there at all.

To customize the gradient, open Witch’s Appearance tab, then click on the color well next to Selection background color to open the color picker. Below the Opacity slider you’ll see a new (unlabeled) gradient slider. Center the slider for no gradient, or pick a spot left of center (lighter at bottom) or right of center (lighter at top) that pleases your eye.

In addition to this new feature, Witch 3.5.1 squashes an annoying bug related to the delay timing of the preview windows. In addition—and I think this is a very cool addition—you can now call up preview windows on demand, even when previews are disabled. Simply press P (or the Space Bar, though this may not work if you use Command in your Witch shortcuts) with any window selected, and its preview will appear. Press P again to make the preview vanish.

There are a few more fixes and improvements detailed on the Witch Release Notes page; you can get version 3.5.1 directly from the product page, or via the built-in updater.

(There were no other changes in this release, and it still works with Safari 4 and/or Mac OS X 10.5, if you’ve not yet upgraded your OS or your browser.)

Basically, as we looked back at the list of changes and additions since Witch 3.0—including today’s update—it seemed unfair to simply call this version 3.3. So after some discussion, we settled on 3.5, as we think that properly reflects all the feature additions and general improvements we’ve made since the release of Witch 3.0.

So what’s new and different in Witch 3.5? The most visible change in this release—and the one that had the largest impact on the version number jump—is that Witch now provides window previews for all windows it knows about.

To see a preview of any window, just leave the window selector on any entry for two seconds. (You can shorten or lengthen the delay before the previews appear, or disable them completely, using Witch’s preferences.)

You can even tell Witch to use a shrunken version of the previews in place of the icons you normally see in the Witch panel.

In addition to the very-useful previews, our new in-app purchasing system (introduced with Leech 2.0.3) has been added to Witch, providing a much-simpler way for trial users to purchase a license.

Witch 3.5 also contains these additional features and improvements:

• Space number badges now scale with the size of the icons. As you make the Witch panel larger, the Spaces badges will get larger, too.
• Space number badges can optionally be shown only for windows in other Spaces (click the Show Space numbers check box one time, to make it a minus sign).
• Jump to the top (T, Home) or bottom (B, End) of the switcher panel via keyboard shortcut.
• For those using a scrollwheel or trackpad to scroll through Witch’s window panel, a new pref enables wrap-around, so that the selector will move from bottom to top (or vice versa) without stopping.

We also squashed some minor yet still-annoying bugs, mainly related to toggling between two windows. To see a full list of changes, just visit the Witch release notes page.

If you’ve enabled automatic updates, Witch should alert you to version 3.5; otherwise, you can download it via the Witch web page.

Because this in-store feature is brand new, we’d like your help in testing it. We’ve tested it internally, of course, but there’s nothing like a little real-world test to really prove it works. If you’ve been thinking about buying Leech, we’d love it if you’d download this latest version and then buy it using the in-app purchase module.

As our way of saying ‘thank you for the help,’ we’ll give the first 25 purchasers (via the in-app module, of course) a coupon good for 40% off their next Many Tricks’ purchase. That means, for instance, that you could buy Witch for around $11, Name Mangler for $6, and Butler for $12. If you shop using our web store, you can apply that 40% to everything you buy, too.

In addition to the in-app purchasing, we also further improved Leech’s interaction with Path Finder, and squished a couple minor bugs; one related to filenames, the other related to Sparkle. As always, you can visit the release notes page to see all the changes.

Launch Leech and it should inform you of the update, or it you can download it directly from our site.

On Tuesday, I’ll be at MacNexus, the Sacramento MUG, and the meeting starts at 7:00pm.

At both meetings, I’ll be talking about Many Tricks, how to interact with Mac developers when you need help, and presenting some of my favorite Mac OS X tips and tricks from my nearly 10 years running macosxhints.com. Oh yes, I’ll also have some freebies to give away—Many Tricks’ apps, plus some other goodies.

If you’re in Portland or Sacramento, drop on in and say ‘hi!’. And if you’re associated with another MUG and are looking for speakers, please let me know—we’re thinking of doing this more regularly to meet some of our fellow Mac users and customers.