Today we released Displaperture 1.2, our free utility to round the corners of your screen. New in this version is support for multi-monitor Macs—you can choose to round the corners on all attached displays, or (the default) just the one with the menu bar. Displaperture now works with Exposé, too, so you won’t lose your nice rounded corners when you activate Exposé.
Finally, for you developers out there, Displaperture is now open source—you can download the source code, and use it as you wish.
…well, it’s actually an acronym, not a word—it’s Minor Update Monday, and here’s what’s on the plate for today’s minor updates. (As usual, you can get the updated version directly from the app, or by downloading the new version from the product page.)
In bigger-project news, Usher is approaching a public beta release, and Peter and I are starting to work on an entirely new application, one that I think will be useful to anyone who uses more than one Mac at home or work…but more on that project once we have something worth talking about!
Macworld is doing their annual GemFest, covering the best of of free and low-cost software. Last week, we were thrilled to see Leech included in the GemFest…and this week, Witch makes an appearance.
Not just an appearance, but an appearance with a perfect five-mouse rating. Having worked for Macworld, I know how rare the five mouse rating is—I think I only handed out a few of them in my nearly five years with Macworld. So Peter and I are, needless to say, thrilled with Macworld’s feelings on Witch.
With that said, we’re even more excited about what we’ve got on the drawing board for Witch 4—we’ve got a list of 30+ new and/or improved features that we’re contemplating for the next major release of Witch. (There’s no timeline for a release as of yet; Witch 3 has only been out for a few months.)
Macworld’s David Chartier reviews Leech 2, and gives it four out of five mice:
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!
Today we released Witch 3.5.2, and for once, we actually didn’t sneak in any new features (I know, you’re in disbelief). Just two minor bug fixes, one of which affected apps with windows in other Spaces when Witch’s Spaces support was disabled. The other cropped up when the key repeat rate was set to ‘off’ in the Keyboard System Preferences panel.
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.
Today we’re releasing minor updates to three of our programs; these are primarily bug fix releases, with little in the way of new features. You can download the latest version from each program’s respective product page, or just check for updates within each program. The updated programs are:
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.
Yea, I know it’s not a word…but it perfectly describes the one notable new feature in Witch 3.5.1: support for gradients in the selection background color.
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.
We’ve updated Safari Guardian for the 64-bit world that is Mac OS X 10.6. So if you’re a Safari Guardian user, download the latest version and you can stop running Safari in 32-bit mode.
(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.)
It seems just weeks ago that I was writing “if we were believers in large version number increments, this could easily be Witch 3.5.” Oh wait…it was just weeks ago, when we released Witch 3.2 with Spaces support. So why are we today releasing Witch 3.5, doing that version-number-jumping thing that both Peter and I dislike?
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:
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.
Today we released a minor update to Leech. The only new functionality (which we’re bringing to our other apps as we update them) is in-app product purchasing. This optional feature—you can always buy it through our web site, just as before—saves you a trip to our site to complete your purchase.
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.
Many Tricks