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Service Scrubber 1.1.5

Friday, June 27th, 2008

No, we still can’t edit signed applications on Mac OS X 10.5 without causing keychain problems (explanation), but Service Scrubber 1.1.5 features an improvement that I, personally, have been looking forward to pretty much ever since Service Scrubber was released — a serious icon.

Granted, this may seem like a nonrelevant problem to some of you, but the old preliminary icon was never meant to stay; and it has bugged me for years. So I’m deeply grateful to Lars Herrmann for creating the icon I had always envisioned.

The other improvement in this version is a French localization overhaul by Ronald Leroux. And speaking of Ronald — being donationware, this doesn’t really apply to Service Scrubber; but if French is your primary language, and if you’re about to buy one of our shareware applications (i.e., Leech, Witch, or yFlicks), you should definitely check out Lingua Franca for localization news. And once you’re there, consider using their “Buy Now” buttons, where available. That way, Ronald will get his share of the sale, compensating for his hard work on all those French localizations.

Witch 2.0.1

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

This time, it’s Witch‘s turn to get a French localization. Moreover, version 2.0.1 sports a shiny new icon by Lars Herrmann and makes sure KeyCue no longer interferes with Witch’s windows selector.

Status Report: Witch Shareware Transition

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

We have sent out Witch licenses to all donators we found in our database. So if you have donated for Witch but haven’t received your license yet, let us know. We know that some of you are still missing out, because some of those license e-mails bounced back.

Fun fact: Witch made more money on its first shareware day than it did during all those donationware years. I guess it’s safe to say that — while being a beautiful concept in theory — donationware isn’t exactly the best way to get rich.

Witch 2.0

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

There’s a problem with Witch: In terms of usage, it’s a simple utility; and there’s not a lot of spiffy new features we would want to add to its straightforward functionality. But under the hood, things change. There’s a lot of things you can or even have to do to make sure Witch remains reliable when faced with future versions of Mac OS X. That’s why Witch 2.0 may seem like a small step to you, but judging from the developer’s point of view, it’s not.

Now, you know how these things go: Whenever someone tells you how he is working really hard for something, there’s a certain chance he’ll end up asking you for money. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do today — after having thought about it for months.

Witch has been distributed as donationware for years, and it was a great time. I loved how users who just couldn’t afford paying more than $2 were able to donate those $2 and feel good about it. I know I always did. But in the long run, it doesn’t really work. If I’m supposed to keep Witch up to date, it will have to be worthwhile; and donationware doesn’t cut it.

Too many users misunderstand my idea of donationware as freeware, and this problem is aggravated by the fact that most Mac news sites and software update providers aren’t willing to make a difference between donationware and freeware. I’ve argued with some of them for years, to no avail. And I understand their point of view. Donationware is hardly an unequivocal term; and if I were to sell a magazine or make a news site successful, I’d probably prefer to allure customers with huge freeware collections, too.

So let’s get rid of the uncertainty that always surrounds donationware. Witch 2.0 is shareware, and you’re expected to pay €9.95 if you plan on using it regularly — unless you’ve already donated for Witch, that is. For us, appreciating past donations from our most loyal supporters is a question of honor.

We’ll start sending out Witch licenses to those who have supported Witch in the past during the next few days. But if you can’t wait, or if you get the feeling we might have forgotten to add you to our list, feel free to drop us a message. For example, I remember receiving some donations via snail mail years ago, and I’m not sure if I can still attribute those to e-mail addresses.


Whew. Now, what are the actual changes in Witch 2.0 — apart from that fancy new license field in Witch’s preference pane? As I’ve said, you won’t even notice most of the changes right now, and in addition to those under-the-hood things, there’s one feature we really wanted to add, but couldn’t: full spaces support. Witch appears in all of your spaces now, but it remains agnostic of which space a given window is in. We just haven’t found a reliable way to gain that piece of information yet — it’s as if the mighty Apple doesn’t want applications to know which space they live in.

But there’s also good news: We’ve added shortcuts for jumping to windows directly (see “Behavior” > “Windows List” > “Show shortcut badges”). So if you want to activate the 7th window in Witch’s list, type “6”, and you’re there. (We’re starting with “0” for the current window.)

And we’re very happy to report that we’ve fixed one of the meanest bugs ever — namely the one that sometimes garbled the windows list’s sorting order when sorting by window activity, a.k.a. “the iTerm bug”.

yFlicks 3.3.1; TubiTunes 1.0.1; Desktop Curtain 1.1

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

We have four updates for you today, and we’ll divide these into two blog entries, because the fourth one needs more detailed explaining.

Let’s start with these two: Just in time to meet today’s 50%-off macZOT promo, both yFlicks and TubiTunes are now capable of downloading the higher-quality MPEG-4 file for a given movie from YouTube, if available. Other than that, we’ve just squashed some bugs — including a particularly embarrassing one: TubiTunes’s automatic update checker didn’t actually check for updates automatically.

What are the other two updates? Desktop Curtain is now ready to deal with multiple screens and spaces. And Witch 2.0 is detailed here.