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How to: Restore Command+Arrow keys in Name Mangler

Sunday, March 3rd, 2013

One of the new features in Name Mangler 3 is a comprehensive history of renaming operations. Name Mangler will remember your last 50 (or more, if you change it in prefs) renaming actions. You can access these saved configurations via our history browser:

To make it easier to browse your history, we provide two keyboard shortcuts: Command-Left Arrow (previous configuration) and Command-Right Arrow (next configuration). Experienced keyboard users will instantly recognize that those are the shortcut keys for jumping to the start and end of text strings in an input box, and may wonder how we have the keys serving both roles.

The short answer is “we don’t.” In Name Mangler 3, you can’t use those shortcut keys to navigate input boxes, only to navigate history.

But there is an easy solution, for those who prefer these keys in their text field roles: change the keyboard shortcuts for the history browser. After changing these shortcuts, the Command plus arrow key shortcuts will work as expected in Name Mangler’s text fields.

If you’re experienced with changing OS X keyboard shortcuts, you just need to assign Previous Configuration and Next Configuration to new shortcuts, and you’re done. If you need more specific how-to help, keep reading.

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Posted in How To, Name Mangler | Comments Off on How to: Restore Command+Arrow keys in Name Mangler

How not to compete in business

Friday, March 1st, 2013

Late in the day on March 1st, we received an explanation/apology from Dietmar Kerschner.
As far as we’re concerned, the personal side of this matter is now closed.

Two days ago, we launched Name Mangler 3, our first major upgrade to the program in nearly three years. This update was user-driven, based on feedback we’ve been tracking since Name Mangler 2 came out. We focused on speed, the ability to perform more than one renaming action, and some user interface improvements. We’re incredibly proud of what we built, and have been thrilled with the initial reaction.

Then yesterday, out of the blue, we received an email claiming we’d violated the copyright of another renaming application. We spent the afternoon researching the other app, and eventually sent an email response back to the accuser, clearly demonstrating our innocence through screenshots and app release timelines. (Name Mangler has existed in pretty much its current form since its initial debut as File List, way back in 2005.)

We thought that would be the end of it, because it was obvious there was no infringement. Today, though, we discovered that our accuser has gone public (despite not replying to our email) with these tweets:

Now that we’re being called thieves in a public forum, we feel we must respond in public as well: we cannot let Dietmar Kerschner trash our hard-earned reputation with baseless accusations that can’t withstand even the most basic level of scrutiny.

A Brief History of Name Mangler presents our side of the story. There you’ll find details on the development of Name Mangler, and that of Renamer(4Mac), the program whose designer has accused us of copyright infringement. Even a quick glance at the page will show that we’ve copied nothing from Renamer—if anything, we could claim that their latest release copied our design.

The purpose of this blog post, though, isn’t to go through a comparison of the two apps. Instead, we’d like to focus on the impact baseless copyright violation accusations have on both developers and (potentially) end users.

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Posted in Company News, Name Mangler, Products | Comments Off on How not to compete in business

The nitty-gritty on buying Name Mangler 3

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

Have you heard the one about the customer who walks into this confusing mess of prices and stores, and says “Look, just tell me how to buy the new version of Name Mangler?”

OK, so it’s not really that bad, but the fact that there are two versions Name Mangler 3 for sale in two distinct channels does make for some potential confusion for those looking to buy. Hopefully this post will clear up any such confusion.

As background, this is the pricing for Name Mangler 3, in both the direct and App Store sales channels:

  • Normal price is $19 ($18.99 in the App Store).
  • Sale price is $10 ($9.99 in the App Store) through March 5th 2013.
  • Direct purchasers of version 2.x can upgrade for $9 through our web site for the next 30 days. Beyond that, the upgrade price will be $14. The upgrade will, as always, get you

This knowledge base article describes the differences between the App Store and direct versions of the program. There aren’t many, but for certain users, there may be some show stoppers for the App Store version. Please check that document before you buy.

The first topic to address is recent buyers, particularly recent App Store buyers. The good news is that if you purchased Name Mangler within the last two weeks (on or after Feburary 13th, 2013), you’re entitled to a free upgrade to Name Mangler 3.

How do you get that upgrade? That depends on where you bought your copy.

  • For direct buyers, we will be sending you a license file, with no action required on your part. (If you already purchased an upgrade license, we’ll be sending you a refund, too.)
  • For App Store buyers, you face a decision. If you want the App Store version, you’ll have to buy it directly from the App Store—we do not have any way to provide free App Store copies to recent purchasers.

    However, you can get a free license to the direct version, if that’s acceptable to you. To get your free license, email me (rob at our domain, or click here) your iTunes receipt, clearly showing your full name, date of purchase, and Name Mangler as the purchased app. I will then verify the receipt and send you a license file.

Read on for some answers to questions that may come up as you’re looking to buy Name Mangler 3…

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Hello, I’m Name Mangler 3, nice to meet you!

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

After a long and intense development period, Name Mangler 3 is now available, either directly from our site or from the App Store (yes, it’s sandboxed). This release is loaded with tons of new features, an updated user interface, and some incredible increases in renaming speed.

Name Mangler 3

The regular price for Name Mangler 3 is $19, but it’s on sale for an astonishing $10 for the next seven days as an introductory special. (Name Mangler 2 users who purchased directly from us can upgrade for $9 for the next 30 days, after which the upgrade price will become $14.)

For a video overview of Name Mangler 3, check out the overview video (also available in ogv and webm formats).

While designing Name Mangler 3, we had four objectives in mind: Safe, Fast, Complete, and Easy. After many months of effort, and lots of great feedback from our beta test team, Name Mangler 3 delivers on all four of these objectives. Keep reading to see just how we’ve added features, improved performance, and revised the user interface to achieve our objectives for Name Mangler 3.

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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

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 »

Name Mangler 2.5.1 released

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

Name Mangler 2.5.1 is out, available for direct customers via in-app updating (or by downloading the full version from our site), and for App Store customers via the Updates tab in the App Store application.

There’s only one change in this version, but it’s an important one. If a rename operation will remove the extension from one (or more) filenames, then Name Mangler will ask you to confirm that this is what you really want to do.

In older versions of Mac OS X (and the Mac OS in general), the loss of an extension wasn’t a big deal—the system didn’t rely on extensions to determine which program should open a given file. Now, however, extensions are quite important; remove the extension from a PNG file, for instance, and OS X will probably think that file is now a Unix Executable file. It’s important to note that the file itself hasn’t been damaged; if you put the extension back, it will work as it did before.

Given OS X’s relatively new reliance on extensions, we felt it important that Name Mangler ask you to reconfirm your intent to remove filename extensions before doing so.

Posted in Name Mangler, Products | 3 Comments »

How to: Add dates/times to filenames with Name Mangler

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

Name Mangler 3 includes date-based renaming features outside of Advanced mode; this article will be of interest only to those running Name Mangler 2.

Name Mangler is our user-friendly yet powerful batch file renamer. In this how-to, I’ll show you how to use Name Mangler’s Advanced mode to add date and/or timestamps to your filenames (and how to replace a portion of the filename, all in one pass).

While Advanced mode can be intimidating, the objective of this tutorial is to show you that it may not be as bad as you fear, and that you can do quite a lot with it. To get the most out of this tutorial, I recommend you create a batch of sample files, and follow along in Name Mangler, trying each step as you read.

Name Mangler’s Help file contains an entire section on Advanced mode, covering all the commands available; if you have the display space, opening the Help window alongside the tutorial and Name Mangler could be very useful.

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Name Mangler 2.5 and Witch 3.8 released

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

Hot on the heels of Moom 2.4, we’ve just released Name Mangler 2.4 and Witch 3.8. These are both “full dot” version number increases; here’s a quick look at what’s new in each program:

Important note: Both Name Mangler and Witch now work only on Intel-based Macs and Mac OS X 10.6 or later. If you’re on a PowerPC-based system, and/or Mac OS X 10.5, you’ll want to remain on your current versions. If you accidentally update, you can download the prior versions from the sidebar on each program’s page.

Name Mangler 2.5

  • Added a File > Populate command (Command-O) to populate Name Mangler’s file list via the OS X Open dialog.
  • Advanced mode’s [pad] and truncate functions can now pad or truncate from the beginning of a string, by using negative numbers.
  • New name.extension and .extension variables ease some Advanced mode renaming tasks.
  • Full list of changes in Name Mangler 2.5.

Witch 3.8

  • The Witch switcher panel now scrolls to display all open windows, regardless of the length of the list. (Prior versions of Witch would extend the panel beyond the screen, but you couldn’t access items below the lower boundary of the screen.)
  • Witch’s debug mode now shows how long it takes for applications to provide their list of open windows. (More detail on this is in the release notes.)
  • Full list of changes in Witch 3.8.

App Store customers can find these new versions on the Updates tab of the App Store application (either now, or in the very near future). Direct customers can download new versions from our site, or use the in-app upates feature to update directly from the application.

Posted in Name Mangler, Products, Witch | Comments Off on Name Mangler 2.5 and Witch 3.8 released

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