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Name Mangler and Butler updates released

Tuesday, June 11th, 2013

We held these off for a day, so as to not steal the thunder from Apple’s WWDC keynote. But now that that’s over with, we’re releasing Name Mangler 3.2 and Butler 4.1.15 into the wild.

Name Mangler 3.2 adds support for Notification Center, and the ability to highlight spaces (including special emphasis on leading, trailing, and double spaces) in your filenames. We added/fixed some other stuff, too—for more details, check out the release notes. Direct buyers can get the update via in-app updating, or by downloading the new version from our site. App Store buyers should see the update in the App Store application (if not now, then shortly).

Note: If you’re running OS X 10.6 or 10.7 and downloaded or updated to Name Mangler 3.2 earlier today, please check again for updates. We just pushed out Name Mangler 3.2.1, which fixes a post-rename crashing bug.

We’re sorry we didn’t catch this one in our testing prior to release. We’ve given ourselves a good talking to, and we’ll do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Butler 4.1.15 fixes a couple of minor bugs and updates how Butler handles clipboard content. The Butler release notes page contains the details on these thrilling changes. Update within the app, or by downloading the new version from our site.

Posted in Butler, Company News, Name Mangler, Products | Comments Off on Name Mangler and Butler updates released

Announcing Many Tricks’ Donation Day

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

In the past, we’ve donated proceeds from our software sales to worthy causes, such as the National Pancreatic Cancer Foundation and Charity:Water. This year, we thought we’d try something different…

On Thursday, December 20*, all of our apps
will be priced at $1 ($0.99 on the App Store).

The catch: We want you to donate the money you saved
(compared to list prices) to the charity of your choice.

For example, if you want to own Moom ($10) and Time Sink ($5), we’ll expect you to donate $13 to your favorite charity. Usher ($35) and Desktop Curtain ($5) would mean a $38 donation. Buy everything in our portfolio for $9, and donate $109 to charity. It’s pretty simple math, regardless of which apps you’re interested in buying. (These donations should be tax deductible, too, but please don’t take our word for that!)

You may wonder how we’re enforcing this donation requirement. The short answer is we’re not. We both firmly believe in the goodness of people, and we’re confident that those who purchase on Thursday will do the right thing. Will everyone? Absolutely not. But we believe that many will, which will hopefully lead to some nice contributions to a wide range of charities.

Sure, we could have kept prices at their normal level, and donated proceeds to a charity or two of our choosing. But we feel strongly that you should be able to pick your own charity, and we hope that by dropping the apps’ prices to $1 for the day, we’ll get more participation than we would by simply donating our proceeds.

So if you’ve been waiting for a good excuse to purchase one or more of our apps, Thursday’s the day. You get the apps you want at an amazing price, you get to choose who gets the money you saved on our apps, and you get to feel good about supporting a charity.

All we ask (ask, not require) is that you let us what you did with the savings. You can either send us an email with the details, or just tweet about it, and copy @manytricks on your tweet. We’d love to know how much money was donated, and to which charities, if you feel like sharing that information.

Happy Holidays!—Peter and Rob.

*

Because the world insists on having multiple timezones, our Donation Day pricing will roll out differently for the App Store and for our web site. App Store buyers will see Donation Day pricing starting at 12:01am on December 20th in their local timezones, and it will end 24 hours later.

On our web site, Donation Day pricing will begin at 7am Pacific USA time on December 20th, and end at 7am Pacific USA time on December 21st. This will give buyers, regardless of their local timezone, 24 hours to purchase directly from us, if that’s their preference.

Posted in Butler, Company News, Desktop Curtain, Donation Day, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | Comments Off on Announcing Many Tricks’ Donation Day

Avoid a Mountain Lion bug that can affect Name Mangler

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Recently, we’ve been getting a few complaints from users, complaining that Name Mangler won’t accept dragged and dropped files.

We were trying to figure out what was going on, given we haven’t changed those apps. It seems the answer is a bug in Apple Events (which handle inter-application communication) that was introduced in 10.8.2. This blog entry explains the problem relative to “Open in Finder” no longer working.

Most importantly, that blog entry also contains a number of fixes. The least painful, though most geeky, is to open Terminal (in Applications > Utilities), paste this command, and then press Return:

sudo killall -KILL appleeventsd

When prompted, enter your admin password and press Return again, and you’re done.

This command forces the Apple Events engine to relaunch; once that happens, the issues you’re experiencing will go away, at least for a while.

Hopefully Apple will fix this in 10.8.3, as it has the ability to interfere with any program that communicates with another application.

Posted in Butler, Name Mangler, Products | Comments Off on Avoid a Mountain Lion bug that can affect Name Mangler

Butler 4.1.14 released

Friday, October 12th, 2012

Butler 4.1.14 is now out, and if you’re running OS X 10.8.2, it’s a very highly recommended update. That’s because the main purpose of this release is to work around a bug that Apple introduced into inter-application communication in 10.8.2. The result of this bug is that Butler would appear to hang at times, typically when it was talking or listening to iTunes.

We’ve worked around that bug, and fixed a couple of other things, and the result is Butler 4.1.14. Get it via in-app updating, or by downloading it directly from the Butler page here.

Obligatory footnote: Yes, we’re still planning on releasing Butler 5. We don’t yet have a beta or release date, but as soon as we have either, we’ll make sure everyone knows about it.

Posted in Butler, Products | Comments Off on Butler 4.1.14 released

Mountain Lion status report (bonus: three app updates)

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Now that Mountain Lion (aka OS X 10.8) is officially out, we can officially update the status of our apps.

The short version: They all work.

The slightly longer version: To the extent that we were able to test all features in all apps, they all work in Mountain Lion. But there are just two of us, and thousands of features to test. So please, let us know if you find any issues. You can do so by going to the support page for any app (i.e. Moom’s support page), which list a few ways to report issues.

We also have three app updates today that fix minor issues in Mountain Lion—and resolve some other bugs and add some new features.

Get Leech 2.1.1 (release notes), Usher 1.1.5 (release notes) and Butler 4.1.13 (release notes) via in-app updating.

Note: If you’re an App Store purchaser of Usher, you should migrate (for free) to the direct sales version. Here’s how and why.

Posted in Butler, Desktop Curtain, Key Codes, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | 3 Comments »

Touch up Tuesdays return: Moom and Witch updated

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Moom 2.4.1 and Witch 3.9 were released this morning, for both direct and App Store customers.

The big news in Witch 3.9 is the Font pop-up menu on the Behavior tab of Witch’s settings panel/window. This is our solution to the “fat font” problem introduced (thanks to Xcode) in Witch 3.8.

Click the Font pop-up menu—and be patient; the first load will take a few seconds—and you can then choose any font on your system for use in the switcher panel. I’m partial to Eurostile, but pick the one you prefer.


The use of Webdings is not advised, unless you’re a fluent reader of Webdings.

You can read about the rest of the changes in Witch 3.9 on the release notes page.

Moom 2.4.1 isn’t as big of an update in terms of eye-catching new features. We did, however, make Moom (and Witch, for that matter) work much better with the virtual keyboard apps Synergy and Teleport (and our own Butler). We’ve also made some changes to how Moom interacts with additional displays; we think it’s now ever smarter than it was. You can find all the changes on Moom’s release notes page.

Both apps can be updated within the app or by downloading a new copy from our site (for direct customers), or via the App Store’s Updates tab (App store customers).

Posted in Butler, Moom, Products, Witch | Comments Off on Touch up Tuesdays return: Moom and Witch updated

How-to: Make Firefox’s bookmarks play nicely with Butler

Friday, December 16th, 2011

One of Butler‘s features is a Bookmarks menu that displays bookmarks from a number of browsers, including classics such as Internet Explorer (thereby revealing the depths of Butler’s life experiences).

You can access these bookmarks from the Butler icon in your menu bar, or create a keyboard shortcut to pop it up as a menu near the mouse, put it in a droplet, etc. In short, it’s a quick way to get at your bookmarks without first going to your browser.

Over the years, however, most of these shortcuts have stopped working, as the various browsers changed the manner in which they store their bookmarks. As of today, in fact, only Safari and Camino still appear to work properly. (We’ll see what we can do about updating support for the other browsers in Butler 5, though we’ll probably not bother to look at Internet Explorer.)

Thanks to Butler user Rick, however, we can add one more browser back to that list: Firefox. He discovered a simple way to get Firefox’s bookmarks working again in Butler. (My workaround has been to use Xmarks to sync bookmarks across all my browsers, and then just use the Safari entry in Butler to see them.) Read on for Rick’s solution…

Here’s how to get your Firefox bookmarks back into Butler’s Bookmarks menu:

  1. In Firefox, type about:config in the URL bar, then press Return. You’ll see a warning about voiding the warranty; click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
  2. In the Filter box, type autoexport, and the list of matches will be reduced to just one: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML.
  3. Double-click anywhere on the browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML line, and you should see its Value entry change to true.
  4. Quit and restart Firefox.

That’s it; in a few minutes, you should find that the Firefox entry in Butler’s Bookmarks item is now populated with your Firefox bookmarks. Thanks again to Rick for pointing out this workaround.

Posted in Butler, How To, Products, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

How-to: Use Butler and AppleScript to open a folder

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

I know what you’re thinking…how hard can it be to open a folder? Not very hard at all. But what I wanted was a way to open a certain folder with a certain view and sort order, even though I may then change that folder’s view and sort order, thereby messing up future openings of that same folder. In my case, I wanted my Downloads folder to open, at a given size and location, sorted in reverse date order. Moom can do 90% of this using saved window layouts, but it can’t do anything with the actual Finder window, such as setting the view and sort column.

After a bit of work with AppleScript, I came up with a solution that got me everything I wanted. By storing the AppleScript in Butler, I can now open my folder with the press of a hot key, at any time from any application. Here’s how I did it.

(more…)

Posted in Butler, How To, Products | 1 Comment »

Butler 4.1.12 released

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Butler 4.1.12 has been released, fixing one crashing issue (which only affected those running 10.7.x) and one cosmetic issue. The crasher wasn’t actually a bug in Butler, but a change in how the system deals with ejecting disks. Basically, if you used Butler’s Volumes menu to eject a disk/disk image, Butler would then crash and burn, but only in OS X 10.7 or newer.

(The cosmetic issue was an abbreviations window that wouldn’t disappear if you used it to run a web search while the browser was the frontmost window.)

You can get the update via in-app updates (the Updates item in the Preferences tab of Butler’s window), or by downloading Butler from our site.

Important: Butler 4.1.12 requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later; if you’re using Mac OS X 10.5 and/or a PowerPC-equipped Mac, you’ll need to stay on Butler 4.1.11. If you find issues with Butler on your PowerPC and/or 10.5 Mac, please send me an email and we’ll see what we can do about the problem.

Posted in Butler, Products | 7 Comments »

Butler 4.1.11 fixes two minor bugs

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Today we released Butler 4.1.11, with two small bug fixes (one for System Preference panels with mixed-case extensions; the other for a problem with window layering and Butler’s docklet).

You can get the update via in-app updating, or by downloading the full program from our site. And yes, we know you’re all anxious for Butler 5. So are we, but we need to do it right.

Posted in Butler, Products | 4 Comments »

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