Many Tricks
In case you missed the news yesterday, Apple held a special event, focused on the Mac.
Aside from introducing a Mac I’ve been waiting for for seemingly forever—the 11.6″ MacBook Air—Apple also gave a very brief sneak peek at Mac OS X Lion, coming to a Mac near you in the summer of 2011.
For Peter and I, this was an interesting day. Neither of us were expecting the next major Mac OS X release to come so soon. And certainly neither of us were expecting it to include an app store…
The Mac OS X app store
As small, independent developers, we’re both thrilled by and scared of the Mac OS X app store. The thrilling bit is the opportunity to get our programs in front of many more eyes than we could ever afford to if we had to market them ourselves. There’s just no way we could purchase an advertising campaign to reach the number of users that the app store is going to reach.
The scary part is adhering to Apple’s rules and restrictions, being at the whim of their approval process, and giving 30% of every revenue dollar to Apple.
Nonetheless, we both feel that Many Tricks needs to be in the Mac OS X app store, so we’re going to do everything we can to have our full product suite there on the day the store launches.
Lion and Many Tricks’ products
So what about Lion (side note: notice that Apple never refers to Lion as Mac OS X 10.7 anywhere on their site?) and its impact on Many Tricks’ products?
For the most part, at least based on what limited information was revealed today, we think most of our apps will run with little to no change on 10.7. There is, however, one app that’s been directly impacted by the Lion announcement: Butler.
On our original 2010 timeline, Butler 5 was slated for a late 2010 release, and we were working towards that launch date…until today’s announcement.
Butler’s feature set means that it relies heavily on the core operating system to do much of what it does…and with that core OS changing within a year, it’d be a real waste of effort for us to spend hundreds of hours finishing and releasing Butler 5, only to find it non-functional a few months later.
So as of today, Butler 5 has been postponed, at least until we can get our hands on Lion and see what’s there, and how it affects Butler. I know many of you may be disappointed with this decision, but it’s really the best one we can make, given the unknown-yet-out-there Lion release.
Note: We will, of course, honor the free upgrade offer for Butler 5: purchasers of Butler 4 today (and prior purchasers, of course) will still get a free license for Butler 5 when it ships.
I can’t provide even an estimated ship date for Butler at this time, because Apple hasn’t told developers when we’ll be able to get our hands on Lion to start working with it. Suffice it to say that we both want Butler 5 out there as soon as we can, so we’ll start work as soon as we can.
Wrapping it all up
Overall, we were pretty happy about how today went—none of our programs were given a death sentence by Lion’s feature set (at least, so it seemed). The Mac OS X app store is an exciting, if a bit scary, proposition, and Lion looks like a release that will further interest people in the Mac platform—and for us small developers, that’s a very good thing.
It is almost completely true that Butler keeps me on the Mac when I should have migrated over to Ubuntu. There is no single program on my Mac that has this kind of pull besides Butler. And there isn’t anything that I know of that performs close to the same function in Linux- not Kupfer, Gnome Do, etc. Even in Windows my choices including Launchy and on up to the incredibly complicated Find and Run Robot don’t do everything I need and use constantly in Butler. I quit Quicksilver altogether even though there are a couple things I miss (quick mouseless file moves).
I have paid scads of bucks for programs on the Mac that have free equivalents on Linux so that I could continue to be productive on the iMac because of how I am able to integrate Butler into my workflow. Programs like Zooom, SizeUp, Path Finder ($ OUCH!), to name a few.
My lappy is Linux and is quad-core i7- sounds like a rocket engine except that it is more powerful and hotter. And I still use my iMac from 3 years ago because of Butler.
Yeah, the announcement to turn my iMac into an iPhone (when I already gave up my iPhone for Android) makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
I hope it works out for Apple and I hope I am pleasantly surprised by Lion before I give up on Steve altogether.
-acepelon
For any of those things you miss from Quicksilver (or any other app), feel free to send them in as feature requests – use the Contact link at the top of any page and I’ll see the email.
-rob.
That’s cool. I don’t love Butler because I’m excitedly looking forward to new features; I love it because it works so well. It is very good software.
Butler 5 delayed again. I’m shocked. :) This is what…. 2… 3 years now?
Well, I wasn’t involved in whatever happened prior to March of this year. The important things to remember are:
* We have one programmer. Having him work for hundreds of hours, only to have the product break in a few months, isn’t a good use of his time.
* Butler 4 still works, and we’ll insure it still works going forward. If anything breaks, we’ll fix it.
* I’m going to use this time to revisit our feature list for Butler 5, and ask all of you what you want to see in it (more on that in the near future).
So yes, it’s delayed, but I think the rationale is very good this time — and given Butler is at the top of both Peter and my “most used apps” list, it’s clearly not being abandoned!
-rob.
So if I understand you correctly, you’re going to delay Butler two months from its release date on an operating system where it works now, and wait to see if it might work on an operating system released late next year?
Mmm. Something doesn’t sound quite right….
That new butler is sure taking his time getting here, isn’t he? :D
Butler 4 works fine for my humble purposes, though, so it’s no big deal as far as I’m concerned. I can see why it’s not appealing to work on it if there’s a risk you have to rewrite everything in a few months.
No. We want to delay Butler so that we can make it work properly with the next operating system — and to take advantage of any cool new stuff Lion lets us do. With only Peter to write code, having him spend the hours required to essentially write Butler twice in the span of six months isn’t something we have the ability to do.
Given the amount of work we need to do to get the apps in the app store, the reality is that Butler probably would have slipped forward anyway — leaving even less time for it to exist prior to Lion’s release.
-rob.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. It sounds to me as if you weren’t going to make the release date anyway, which is fair enough. I just don’t think saying it is because of Lion is really accurate since you wouldn’t have made it anyway.
Whoa, pretty big jump there to “we wouldn’t have made it anyway.” I can tell you we were going to make that date, as we’ve had it circled on the calendar for most of this year now. However, the moment we heard about both the app store and the 10.7 ship date, we figured it was time to reprioritize. Getting into the app store at launch became our immediate short-term goal, and having a Butler 5 with a shelf life not measured in months became our longer-term goal. Hence the decisions we made.
Had none of this happened, Butler 5 would’ve been out before the end of the year—that, at least, is what we were working towards.
-rob.
Don’t you think that ControlCenter might make Witch sort of… outdated?
For those who like and use Exposé, Control Center will be a welcome addition. For those who prefer a more direct (list-based) method of accessing windows and apps, Witch will play the role it’s always played.
-rob.
Well, well, well, let’s not jump to conclusions (or what one says in English, it’t not my native language either).
What I hope is that the App Store will provide its accredited developers with information about Mac OS X Lion, this would be the natural thing to do. Although … I don’t really know about whether Apple does “natural things” with and to its developers …
So, in consequence, I also hope that the roadmap may actually be shorter once the App Store is there.
[shrug] Call it wishful thinking ;-)
Understandable, but nonetheless, very disappointing. I’ve been postponing getting several utilities, thinking that the functions might be included in the upcoming Butler v.5. This would seem to put off the release by a year – if Lion is released summer of 2011 (meaning really Fall of 2011).
Any chance that you could give us at least some insight into the feature set anticipated to be included in the new release?
I’m more interested in what you, our users, think should be there, and there will be more news on that shortly—getting all of your requests into our queue of possibilities. I’m hesitant to share some of what’s on our list, simply because there are a number of Butler competitors out there, and there’s no reason to give them advance notice of what we plan to do.
I will say we’re working on an interface overhaul to make it more approachable (yet no less powerful), great improvements in the pasteboard functionality, easier use of Butler across multiple Macs, changes to the bookmark function, and a rework of the Address Book integration.
But as I said, stay tuned for info on how you can contribute your ideas for Butler 5, too.
-rob.
This whole thing is really disappointing. Butler is still my go-to application. I don’t know what to do without it. Very good work. However, all the broken promises of releasing new version (I remember those version that used to run for 6 months because “Butler 5 was around the corner”)….have tested my love for Butler. It’s still there, don’t get me wrong, but to say that you have to postpone it because of Lion seems rather strange. Why do you think Lion will break Butler?
Of course, every major new OS X version had it hickups (some still persist in Butler – like you’re not able to open the preferences once you entered text in the launch window), but the whole thing seems a bit not quite honest.
Just my 2 cents. I still love Butler a lot, because it has been with me for a very long time now and I still use it thousands of times a day, but I would like to see some improvement. I’m longing for new stuff in Butler!
Here’s the problem: we have limited resources (one programmer, to be exact). We need to make all our apps compatible with the app store, which is far from a trivial task. We also need to make them compatible in such a way that we don’t have to maintain two completely distinct code bases for each program. That all takes time—perhaps even most of the next 90 days before the app store launches. (As but one example, we can’t leave Sparkle auto-updates in our apps, nor can we have serial number checkers…but we need both those things in the versions we sell outside of the app store.)
So that means that we can’t realistically expect to start working on Butler until sometime in January. If we then took two to three months to finish Butler, we’d have it out in April. Then, as early potentially as June (or as late as September), 10.7 ships. As of today, we don’t know if it breaks Butler or not, because we haven’t seen it. So instead of spending all that time now, we’d rather wait and see what’s there—and what neat cool stuff we may be able to take advantage of—and then release a really good Butler 5 that can exist for much longer than a few months without (potentially) needing a major update.
In short, with limited resources, we’re unwilling to wager them on having to do two major Butler releases within a six-month time frame. Butler, while an incredibly important product to a number of people, isn’t actually a big seller—it’s actually near the bottom of our sales charts. (Yes, a new version may help that somewhat, but Butler has always been a niche tool, appealing to a set of users who really like to get the most out of their Macs…sadly, that’s not a large population, it seems.)
When will Butler 5 ship? I honestly don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be a full year out—once we have Lion code we can work with, we can start, and hopefully ship before Lion does (excluding any features that might require Lion to work, of course). Sorry to disappoint some users, but as a two-person operation, our resources are extremely limited (and hiring more programmers isn’t, right now, something that’s economically feasible).
-rob.
Rob already said most of this, but maybe it helps if I try to summarize my thoughts on this in my own words.
Ever since Apple introduced Spotlight, the need for “launchers” has decreased, and Mac OS X 10.7 bringing the Springboard to the Mac is another step in that direction. Seeing how that works, how it does some things well and possibly leaves openings for 3rd-party apps elsewhere is crucial for planning Butler’s future. After all, Butler started as a launcher almost 10 years ago, but it looks like we shouldn’t focus on that anymore. And as Rob already stated, we won’t have time to do this kind of fundamental reorientation again any time soon.
The other thing is that Butler is a very old application in some respects, and the main focus for Butler 5 is to bring it up to speed with the present. Now, if you are in the middle of doing that, and if Apple then tells you that there will be a different present in half a year (at least for us developers), you can’t help but think: “D*mn, I’m going to be outdated again!” For once, I want Butler to be up to date again.
Lastly, the Mac App Store changes the game more than you might think. Under the hood, Butler does a lot of stuff that—judging from the app store’s current preliminary documentation—would make it very unwelcome in Apple’s store. And since we’re in the middle of re-inventing the product anyway, I’m sure it’s understandable that we’d like to be able to publish it in the App Store eventually.
So for those of you who are waiting for Butler 5 because they are waiting for a certain additional feature that Butler 4 doesn’t have—don’t hold your breath. We want version 5 to be to Butler what Snow Leopard was to Mac OS X, modernizing internal mechanisms and streamlining the interface so it’s less daunting to new users. If there’s one thing, on the other hand, that Butler already has plenty of, it’s features. That doesn’t mean we’re not interested in your suggestions—far from it, of course! But I guess it’s fair to let you know that new features won’t be our main concern.
Anyway, I’m very sorry if this decision disappoints some of you. To some extent, we feel the same way, but to us, it’s clearly the only way to go—right after I was done watching this week’s keynote, I told Rob: “Apple just postponed Butler.” And Rob said: “I think you’re right.”
> Butler does a lot of stuff that [..] would make it very unwelcome in Apple’s store
Would/could you please elaborate on that?
@Tom: If this was an accurate representation of those guidelines (I can’t link to or discuss the real ones), then section 2.5 would be a problem for Butler, for instance.
Phew, looks quite restrictive :-(
Can’t understand all the disappointed users here … Butler still works just as well as it ever has, on Snow Leopard. Fast, easy, slick, and more versatile than anything (besides QuickSilver). So it isn’t going to get a whole bunch of (who knows what) additional features this year – it still does perfectly what I bought it to do in 2004.
I can only sign what cv186 says. Butler is THE single and most used utility on my Mac.
I still love Butler version 4 but, very, very disappointing about the delay of version 5.
Can you please elaborate about the Serial Number Checkers. Will the app store change the way Butler 5 is registered? I paid for Butler 4, and with that I ‘d hope to get Butler 5 the same way as version 4… without the need for connecting to a server for activation.
I understand that software developers need to find ways to protect their investment but, I will not pay for things that I can not own. Years ago, when i was a Windows user, I bought software packages that needed activation, and when those companies went out of business I could no longer reinstall that software. I can not support this purchasing model.
Please, from what little you know of the Mac App Store, is it possible now to know if you are going to change this?
I wish you well in all your endeavors.
The app store won’t let us include serial number or licenses of any kind. Butler 5 will be free for all purchasers of Butler 4, as previously announced. For the record, Many Tricks doesn’t do any “connecting to a server” for activation. You simply apply a license file, and you’re done. You can use this one license on as many Macs as you personally own and use.
So in short: if you want Butler 5 for free, get it from us when it comes out, not the App Store (if we can even get it into the App Store; see Peter’s comments above on that). We don’t do activation, we don’t do software rental, and when you buy something from us, you own the app. (Though by law, you’re merely licensing the code, as we still own that. But your copy will never expire, fail to validate, etc.)
Hope that clarifies things!
-rob.
Dear Many Tricks,
Many thanks for Butler. Butler is amazingly cool and useful in so many ways. The biggest “problem” with making full use of it is figuring it out. What documentation there is is clear and helpful, but while you’re waiting for Lion, could you possibly implement the “more…” item at the bottom of the tasks list and include such things as descriptions of smart items that are not documented now. For instance, what’s the difference between “Shut down…” and “Shut down”?
@Jeff Byers: The ellipsis (three dot symbol for something left out) at the end of any menu entry on the Mac means that choosing this opens a dialogue, in this case with the question whether you really want to dhut down.
W/o the ellipsis the command will simply be obeyed, i.e. in this case the machine will shut down without any question. (I think, however, that programs with unsaved files will nevertheless bug you and this may prevent the machine from shutting down.)
I don’t think specially pandering to the App Store is really a good use of your “limited resources”; it’s a very authoritarian and [overly] restrictive environment at least the way it’s been announced for the desktop. Even though Witch for instance may not be the same as Exposé or Control Center and Butler isn’t the same as Spotlight or Springboard, the fact is Apple is position itself in a conflict of interest: They’re providing the machine, the OS, and the marketplace, and they don’t want anybody to compete with them (see the “can’t be confusingly similar to an Apple product” section). This kind of concrete anti-competitive measure could very well serve to have you waste your time, as they may simply decide that you are too similar to an Apple feature or some framework that would make usability much nicer is one they don’t like. Not to mention that it being a “marketing campaign” is utter crap; once the store bloats up to epic proportions nobody will be able to find you (or anyone else) above another any more than they already do now.
I don’t mean to be hyper-critical but there seems to be a huge belief that the App Store is a boon to developers because it will bring products to them and the reality is that it simply isn’t going to help people find your app any more than being in Google does. Try searching for a task manager on an iOS device and you’ll only see whoever already has the most sales and best reviews, which is likely the same developers that spent the most on marketing outside of the App Store and did special keyword analysis to make sure you’re there.
You should spend your valuable resources making sure the code is clean, tested, stable, and doesn’t regress in capability. The iOS model only works because there is literally no other choice, so it allows Apple to skim and shape as they please. Then if you get shot off the App Store because “OH NOSE YOU USED A MENU FRAMEWORK WE GREEDILY HELD TO OURSELF TO MAKE YOUR PRODUCT BETTER”, used an “optional system component” (yes, this is disallowed as well), or they think you’re too similar to an existing thing they wrote and don’t want people touching, you’ve only gotten better—not lost capability you gutted pandering to Steve.
Desktop App Store is an outlet, not the endgame.
I don’t think Peter or I see it as an endgame. That’s why, for instance, we’ve spent no time working on Witch, Butler, or Leech for the Mac OS X App Store. All three apps would be denied in their current form, and would take substantial rework (if it were even possible) to get them in approval-ready form.
On the other hand, not spending a bit of time to put our other products there would be missing an opportunity. How big of an opportunity? Who knows, but if we didn’t try, we’d never know. The opportunity may turn out to be nothing, to be only short term, or to be long term … but we wanted to be there with the apps we could, just so we’d have the chance.
The good news is that the other three apps (Name Mangler, Time Sink, Usher) are already done and in the queue waiting for approval — so our work on them is done unless Apple rejects them.
I have no idea if the Mac OS X App Store will be successful or not … but at least now we’ll have some presence there while we see how it goes.
-rob.
Is it safe to assume that Butler 5 will work on Snow Leopard? While I would love to always have the latest and greatest my main Mac is a work computer and I don’t get to make that decision.
Thanks,
Mark
At this time, that’s a safe assumption to make – I can’t see us ignoring the prior OS X release. Barring any unforeseen issues, we plan on supporting both 10.6 and Lion with Butler 5. If that changes for any reason, I’ll be sure to publish something about it.
-rob.
I love Butler. I have for years now. It allows me to kill Spotlight and the Dock, without ever missing either. It basically does what would require several other apps would do, and it does it more efficiently and elegantly. So far in Snow Leopard, it runs very well. Only very occasional crashes. I recently killed the Dock entirely, and my MacBook Pro has been running better than ever. We’ll see if it was linked to the Butler crashes.
All I know is this… if Butler ceases to work on a new iteration of the Mac OS, then it can longer be considered a Mac. Butler is the missing link that Apple could never figure out it was missing.
Oh, and please, I don’t want to hear any more whining about Butler 5!! Developing software is such an insane undertaking, and anyone who complains about what Many Tricks has had to do to survive just doesn’t get it. These guys are in a constant state of dodging bullets from the Apple gun, on top of planning the use of their time to actually benefit from the work they do. Oh, and by the way, Butler still works *fabulously*.
Give it a rest, guys.
I agree w/ everything you say, Andy. But your greatest statement is this: “[..] if Butler ceases to work on a new iteration of the Mac OS, then it can longer be considered a Mac.” Yes, yes, and yes!