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A major number of minor updates

Tuesday, June 14th, 2022

Today we’re catching up on a bit of a backlog of minor updates…the following apps have updates available for both their direct versions, and (where applicable) their App Store versions. Here’s what’s been updated, highlighting any important changes in each update. You can also click through to the release notes for the full details on each update.

  • Butler 4.4.5 [notes] We’ve hopefully fixed an issue that would sometimes cause Butler to hang if Music was running.
  • Keymou 1.2.10 [notes] We renamed ‘Move to Edge/Corner’ action (and added more details about it in Help) to hopefully prevent user confusion over its effect.
  • Leech 3.1.7 [notes] Nothing changed that you’d notice, but we fixed some minor bugs and improved the behind-the-scenes code.
  • Menuwhere 2.2.1 [notes] Fixed a bug that caused the preferences window to appear on launch, regardless of the setting for showing the preferences.
  • Moom 3.2.25 [notes] The ‘Bring Moomed windows to the front automatically’ setting is now applied more consistently. Lots of other little changes, too—see the notes.
  • Usher 2.2.1 [notes] There are a ton of behind-the-scenes improvements, and you can now insert metadata references into Notes via the Edit menu.

As always, direct users can update in the app itself, or by downloading a fresh copy of the app from our web site. App Store users should see the updates in their App Store app—if not already, then very shortly.

Save 50% on all our apps, and help the people of Ukraine

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

Wrap up: The fundraiser has now ended. Through the sale period, our customers purchased just over $4,000 worth of our apps—wow! Peter and I are also going to contribute roughly $1,000 of our own money, bringing the total donation to $5,000, which we’ll split evenly between Global Giving and UNICEF. Thanks to everyone who participated!


Between now and the end of the day Sunday, March 6th, every one of our apps is on sale for 50% off*.

We will donate all of our net proceeds raised from the sale to two charities that are supporting relief efforts in Ukraine: Global Giving’s Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund and UNICEF‘s efforts to support Ukranian children and families.

This isn’t much, we know, but it’s a bit, and every little bit helps.

* If you want to save exactly 50% off, then you’ll want to purchase directly from us for apps whose prices aren’t divisible by two. On the App Store, we have to use price tiers, and in cases where we couldn’t divide things equally in two, we went with the higher tier, to increase the donation amount.

Usher 2.2 released

Monday, December 20th, 2021

Usher 2.2 is out, with a number of changes as detailed in the release notes. Most notably, Usher can now tell the difference between files that are simply unavailable (due to an unmounted volume) and those that are truly missing. We also fixed rotated movie playback on macOS Monterey, and improved full screen mode for those of you using notched displays.

As always, you can update from within the app, or by downloading a fresh copy of the app (you won’t lose any settings) from the Usher web page.

Our apps and macOS Monterey compatibility

Thursday, November 4th, 2021

Sorry this is a bit late; I didn’t think about it much because, well, everything basically works fine. There are two minor issues (you can’t see rotated movies in Usher, and menu items for saved layouts in Moom are slightly too tall), but both will be fixed in upcoming minor updates. Outside of those two things, we’re not aware of any other issues with our apps in macOS Monterey.

If you do run into a glitch of some sort, please do let us know about it.

Updates for our end-of-alphabet apps

Thursday, July 22nd, 2021

Not by plan, but today’s updates affect only the end of the alphabet:
Time Sink, Usher, and Witch have all been updated. These are primarily bug fix and behind-the-scenes updates—check the release notes (Time Sink • Usher • Witch) for each for all the details, but there are two new features that may be of interest to users of Usher or Witch:

  • Usher adds multi-criteria sorting—try holding the Shift key down when choosing a sort criteria.
  • Witch gains support for tabs in Microsoft’s Edge browser.

The updates are available now, and can be found by checking for updates within each app. (The update for the App Store version of Time Sink can be found in the App Store app, and it’s also available now.)

Usher 2 is now available

Tuesday, May 18th, 2021

Usher 2.0 is out, and available now for both new customers and those upgrading from previous versions. The normal price is $20 for a new user and $10 for an update, but for the next two weeks, new users pay just $14, and updates are only $6.

Either type of purchase includes at least a year of updates; after that, it will cost $10 to update to the most-current version at any point in the future—and that purchase will also include another year of updates. More details on our evolutionary update model are provided in this blog post.

What’s new in Usher 2? Way too much to even try to list here; a read-through of its release notes shows just how much we’ve added, improved, and fixed in this release. We spent a lot of time and effort improving scrolling speed when browsing large collections, and have added many new view modes to help you browse your collection. But really, those are the tip of a very large iceberg of new features and improvements.

If you’ve never used Usher, download the trial version today and test it out for a full month to see everything that it can do.

Usher 2 beta 4574 released

Monday, November 30th, 2020

Usher 2 beta 4574 is out, and the biggest change—at least for users of Apple silicon Macs—is that it’s now a Universal app that runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

This release adds a news feature that makes it easy to change the spacing between thumbnails by Shift-dragging on the image size slider. We’ve made lots of other improvements, too, as you can see in the release notes.

You can update to the newest Usher via the in-app updater, or by downloading a new copy of the app from our site.

Our Big Sur app compatibility report

Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

With Big Sur’s release, here’s an update on our apps’ compatibility…

All of our apps run in Big Sur, and almost all of them run 100% perfectly.

We’ve tested them all many times, and they all seem to be working as we’d expect them to, with one minor exception (and a “check your version” warning about one of our baubleries). We also have a general heads-up on a permissions request you may or may not see from some of our apps.

Although we’ve tested extensively, some of our apps have lots of features and can be used in many different ways, and we probably didn’t test all of those cases—many of you seem to find ways to use our apps that we never anticipated! So if you do find something that’s not working right in Big Sur, please let us know by opening a support ticket.


Permissions request

In our testing with Big Sur’s release candidate, we were surprised to find that some of our apps ask for permission to write to the Documents and/or Desktop folders. We’ll be completely honest here and say that we have no idea why this is happening. We have some guesses, but they’re just guesses at this point.

This issue did not appear in any of the prior betas (nor did it happen with every app), so we just discovered it yesterday when we installed the final version. As a general rule, our apps—unless you’re doing something that explicitly uses one of those folders, like saving Leech downloads to your Desktop—do not write to those locations.

We’re trying to get an answer as to why this dialog is appearing, but until we do, you can safely say “Yes” when macOS asks if it’s OK to use those folders—becausedo we’re not using them.

App-specific items

Displaperture: Please update to the current version (1.5.2) of Displaperture before you try using it in Big Sur. There’s no in-app updater, so you’ll have to download the new version from our site.

If you launch an older version, you may find yourself staring at a blank whiteish screen with rounded corners, and nothing else on it at all. Unfortunately, this screen sits above everything, including the Force Quit dialog. If you have remote login enabled and access to another Mac, you can connect and kill the Displaperture process, but if you don’t…well, the only way out is a forced reboot.

So please, make sure your copy of Displaperture is up to date before you launch it.

Witch: As a general statement, Witch is working fine. However, you will notice at least a few additional windows, mainly related to things in the menu bar. We’re working to get rid of these spurious entries, but for now, here’s the best workaround…

On the Advanced tab in Witch’s preferences, in the Do not list apps text box, enter this:

Control Center, SystemUIServer

If you have existing entries there, put a comma at the end and add the two new entries. Next, in the Do not list windows, enter this:

Item-0

Again, if you have existing entries, add a comma then that text.

These two changes should make Witch look mostly as it did in pre-Big Sur systems.


We’re working on the Witch issues, and we’ll keep you updated on our progress.

Again, if you notice anything askew in Big Sur, please do open a support ticket and let us know.

Usher 2 beta updated…and a pre-sale!

Thursday, April 30th, 2020

If you’re using the Usher 2 beta, make sure you get today’s update—it’s a biggie, but it also marks a “no turning back” point: If you install and use this update, and make changes to your library, you will not be able to return to Usher 1.

Why not? Usher’s release notes explain it well:

Tags and Properties now use the CSV format for their values, which necessitates a library file format change, which in turn has backwards compatibility ramifications. See the note that will appear after updating for more info on this.

Given that Usher 1 only works on pre-Catalina versions of macOS, this is really only a decision to worry about if you’re on an older version of macOS.

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Ushering in a new era

Friday, September 13th, 2019

For those of you who use Usher, you’re probably well aware it’s a 32-bit application, and will stop working when macOS Catalina ships this fall. This was a key factor in our decision to retire Usher back in 2017.

But since its retirement, all has not been quiet with Usher—at least not privately. We’ve stripped out the old 32-bit QuickTime engine and replaced it with the modern AVFoundation (a.k.a. QuickTime X). This wasn’t a trivial change, but we’ve reached a point where we’d like to invite Usher users to help test what we’re calling Usher 2.

Usher 2 is a 64-bit app, ready to run in both macOS Mojave and Catalina when it ships this fall. We’d like all current Usher users—as well as others interested in the media management and playback features of Usher—to download the Usher 2 beta and give it a spin.

We’re very interested in feedback, of course. Not just does it run (we’re quite confident in that one), but what do you like, what don’t you like, what key feature that used to exist is now missing and you absolutely must have it, what other features would you like to see, etc.

What’s new in Usher 2, other than the entire engine that runs in? There’s a full list in Usher’s release notes, but here are a few highlights…

  • If Usher can’t directly open a file (that is, QuickTime X doesn’t support its codec), Usher will fall back to opening the file with its default app.
  • If you use VLC, Usher can monitor VLC’s playback progress and start the next movie in an Usher playlist when the first is done.
  • Dark mode support
  • Play movies backwards, and/or at double speed.

There’s a ton of other stuff, so do check out the release notes! We’ve also tried to predict which questions you may ask us about Usher 2…

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