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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021
Keymou 1.2.9 is now a universal app built for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. It’s also got a shiny new icon, and its interface now feels more at home on Big Sur.
Key Codes 2.2.1 also has a new icon, which is really all that’s changed in this update.
Direct users can update in-app, or by downloading a new copy of the app(s) from our site; App Store users should see the updates in the Mac App Store app, if not yet then very shortly.
Oh wait, did I say something about a birthday?! Yes, I did. No, not a person’s birthday, an app’s birthday: Moom is 10 years old today!
In celebration of this milestone, Moom is on sale for 50% off (just $5.00 in US currency) for the next five days. So if you or someone you know has been thinking about buying Moom, these next five days would be an excellent time to do so.
So happy birthday, Moom…and many more!
Posted in Company News, Key Codes, Keymo, Moom | Comments Off on Keymou and Key Codes updated…and a birthday!
Thursday, April 28th, 2016
Ever since Peter and I relaunched Many Tricks in 2010, we’ve never had an official software license agreement. The closest thing we’ve had is this blog post, which explains limits on the use of our apps across multiple Macs (tl;dr: Use them on as many Macs as you personally use). However, we’ve never had an actual end user license agreement (EULA) that spells out the legal license you agree to when you purchase one of our apps.
Well, we have one now—it’s also permanently linked in the sidebar here, and will be accessible from within our apps. And a really big thanks to Rich Siegel at Bare Bones Software, who generously agreed to let us use his document as a starting point. I found the Bare Bones EULA to be well written, brief, and easily understood; hopefully our version, which has only minor changes, is still all of those things.
After six years, why did we suddenly need an EULA? The truth is we probably should have had one from day one, but never really felt the need. Recently, however, we’ve received inquiries from government agencies and larger companies interested in buying our apps … and many of these customers aren’t allowed to purchase our apps unless we have an actual legal license agreement. So now we do.
Note that this doesn’t change anything relative to the usage of our apps; we still allow you to use one license to install our apps on as many Macs as you personally use. We just needed to have a formal legal software license for larger customers and government agencies.
Posted in Butler, Company News, Desktop Curtain, General, Key Codes, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Resolutionator, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | Comments Off on The new Many Tricks’ end user license agreement
Thursday, April 7th, 2016
Final update: Moom 3.2.5 has been released on the App Store; this fixes the drag-to-display bug and all App Store users should now update.
Update: If you have the App Store version of Moom, and if you use multiple displays, then please don’t update to Moom 3.2.4—we just found and fixed an issue with moving windows to other displays. The Moom version on our site has been updated to 3.2.5, and we’re in the middle of submitting an App Store update.
As mentioned in the release notes, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience. This was entirely my fault. —Peter
Hot on the heels of our recent Time Sink and Keymo updates come two larger updates: Moom 3.2.4 and Name Mangler 3.3.6.
These releases re-sync the versions numbers between the App Store and direct versions, and both feature some bug fixes and general improvements. You can read the details in the release notes for Moom and Name Mangler, respectively.
The big news in both versions (and coming soon to all our other apps) is our totally rewritten help system. You can read all about the new help system in the linked blog post, but the key bits are that search and navigation are now much nicer, and the window is a real (non-floating!) OS X window that’s visible to apps like Witch.
Direct customers can get the Moom and Name Mangler updates via the in-app updater, or by downloading the full versions from our site. App Store customers should see the updates in their App Store app—if not now, then shortly.
Posted in Keymo, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Time Sink | Comments Off on Moom and Name Mangler updated
Thursday, April 7th, 2016
Starting with our recent update to Keymo, we rolled out a new help system. We developed this new system to solve some aggravations we were having with Apple’s built-in help system, and to provide our users with a better help experience. This new help system will be rolling out to all our apps in the very near future.
Here’s a quick peek at the first screen of Moom’s new help:
There are many aspects to our new help system that should make in-app help work much better for our users—some new features, some existing features working better, and a revamped look and feel.
(more…)
Posted in Butler, Desktop Curtain, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Resolutionator, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | Comments Off on Announcing our new in-app help system
Tuesday, April 5th, 2016
Today we released updates to Keymo (1.2.4, both direct and App Store) and Time Sink (1.2.5, for the App Store only).
The Keymo update features our brand-new help system with greatly improved navigation and a much more functional search. (This help system will be rolling out to all our apps in the near future.) With this update, both the App Store and direct versions of Keymo are in sync at 1.2.4.
The Time Sink update brings the App Store version into sync with the direct version at 1.2.5; there are no substantive changes in the Time Sink update.
As always, direct customers can use the in-app updater or download the full version from our site, and App Store customers should see the updates in the App Store app—if not now, then in the very near future.
Posted in Keymo, Products, Time Sink | Comments Off on Time Sink and Keymo updated
Sunday, January 31st, 2016
Yes, that’s right, we’ve updated the updater in our direct apps. Our direct apps rely on Sparkle to inform you when there are new versions available. Over the weekend, we were made aware of a potential vulnerability in how we implemented Sparkle. Basically, if your network is already compromised by what’s called a Man in the Middle attack, then it’s possible an attacker could use the Sparkle update mechanism in our apps to remotely execute code on your Mac. That’s bad.
Although this is a relatively small exposure (as you must already be on a compromised network), we felt it was important to act on it right away, so we’ve updated all of our apps to use Sparkle over secure HTTP (HTTPS). Please update any directly-purchased Many Tricks apps immediately.
Important: There’s a bit of a Catch-22 here … in order to get you this update, it must come over insecure HTTP, because that’s how Sparkle in the app you’re using is configured. If you are concerned that you might be on a compromised network, please do not update using the in-app updater. Instead, just download the relevant app(s) directly from our site, which uses HTTPS.
If you have any questions on this update, please leave a comment or email us directly, and we’ll do our best to address your questions.
Note: Although our App Store apps don’t use Sparkle, we know they’re out of date with some of the other minor bug fixes that came with these releases. We’ll be submitting updates to the App Store next week to get App Store users current.
Posted in Butler, Company News, Desktop Curtain, Key Codes, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Resolutionator, Time Sink, Witch | Comments Off on All direct apps updated to improve update security
Monday, December 14th, 2015
People ask us all the time, “When are your apps going on sale?” And we always reply “We don’t know,” because, generally, we don’t know. But we know now: Our apps—when you purchase directly from us—are on sale for the remainder of 2015, and there are two ways to take advantage of the sale.
Option One: Own Them All
First off, you can own them all for just $50—that’s $62 off the normal price of $112 for all 10. All ten apps, fifty bucks total. These are fully licensed versions, not some special one-off, so they’re all eligible for upgrade pricing when major new releases come out.
On the charity drive front, we will donate $10 for each bundle sold to the United Nation’s refugee fund, to help with the ongoing global refugee crisis. And to get things started, we’ve already donated $500 to the fund.
Option Two: Save Some Coin
If you don’t really want all our apps (we don’t understand such thinking, of course!), you’ll want to use option two: Every purchase is 30% off for the remainder of the year.
We will donate 10% of our net proceeds from any individual sales to that same UN refugee fund.
About the Mac App Store
You may have noticed that this sale is only available to customers who purchase directly from us; our App Store app pricing is unchanged, and we can’t create a bundle of apps there anyway.
So why aren’t the individual MAS versions on sale? Quite honestly, we feel Apple has ignored the MAS for too long, and as a result, the customer experience is not what it should be. Add in the recent snafu with certificates, and we would like to reward those who choose to purchase direct. That’s why this sale is for direct customers only.
So there you have it, the Many Tricks year-end sale event and charity drive.
Posted in Butler, Company News, Desktop Curtain, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Resolutionator, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | Comments Off on The Many Tricks holiday sale event and charity drive
Monday, September 28th, 2015
There are a couple of changes in the soon-to-be-released El Capitan that required us to update our direct-sales app update mechanism—an incredible open-source framework known as Sparkle. (App Store versions don’t have this update mechanism, because the App Store app handles app updates.)
Because of how we implemented Sparkle, we found that the updater wasn’t working properly in El Capitan. So we needed to fix this prior to El Capitan’s release. As a result, today we have updated every single direct app we sell (and even one we give away):
Butler, Desktop Curtain, Key Codes, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Time Sink, Usher, and Witch
We have pushed all these updates live, so you should see them automatically (if you have our apps set to auto-update), or you can look in the Preferences > Updates section of a given app and manually check for updates. You can also download the complete new version from our site, if you prefer (just delete the old one and replace with the new; you won’t lose your settings.)
Posted in Butler, Company News, Desktop Curtain, Key Codes, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Resolutionator, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 22nd, 2015
Over the last few days, several users let me know they were unable to download our apps from the Mac App Store. They reported that they were receiving this error message when trying to purchase or update:
App Store Error: Failed to verify the preflight file. It is not signed by Apple.
Emails like this are frustrating, because we have absolutely no official way to help such users—Apple handles everything related to the store after we submit our app. They test the app, hopefully approve the app, and then host it for downloading. If the app makes it through this process, it’s pretty clear the code itself is good, and any download issues are related to the user’s system.
In theory, Apple (in exchange for their 30% cut of our revenue) should be helping these users solve such problems. But based on what I’ve heard, that’s not usually the case, so they end up writing to me. After a bit of web searching, I found the cause and solution to the problem: Keychain Access.
In particular, the settings for OCSP and CRL in Keychain Access > Preferences > Certificates. For some apps, and for some users (but not for all apps, and not for all users; I don’t know why), these values must be set to “Best Attempt:”
If these two values are set to anything else, it’s possible that some apps and/or updates will fail to download with the above-noted error message. I’ve never personally touched those settings, and I was curious why others might; a friend pointed out this thread, which recommends changing the settings to reduce background bandwidth usage by the ocsp process.
In any event, if you’re having troubles downloading apps and updates—not just ours, but from any developer—from the App Store, check these settings in your Keychain Access app.
Posted in Desktop Curtain, Key Codes, Keymo, Mac App Store, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2015
As you surely know by now, Apple announced OS X El Capitan (aka Mac OS X 10.11) this week, with general availability this fall. They also released a developer beta, so we were able to give our suite of apps a quick test on the new system.
Given El Capitan’s focus on improving Yosemite, not implementing wholesale changes to the system’s fundamentals, we were hopeful that things would just work.
And that’s what we found: all of our apps appear to work fine. We have not done extensive testing of 100% of the features in 100% of the apps, but they all launch and run, and we tested a number of functions in each app. Even older versions of our apps, such as Name Mangler 2, appear to run fine.
We may have some minor tweaking to do, due to the change in the system font, but the apps themselves are all running under El Capitan. Yes, this includes Butler. Yes, this includes Usher. And Time Sink. And everything else, including Displaperture and the beta Resolutionator. Even our two Safari extensions appear to work.
So if you’re a developer using the preview, or you’re planning on installing the public beta when it’s released, our apps should work as expected. Of course, please let us know if you run into any issues—it’s very difficult for us to test every feature in every app by ourselves.
Posted in Butler, Desktop Curtain, Displaperture, Key Codes, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Resolutionator, Safari Extensions, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | 12 Comments »
Many Tricks
