How-to: Clean up filenames using Name Mangler

January 31st, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Name Mangler can be used for many file renaming purposes; many people use it to change the generic IMG_ (or whatever) prefix their camera applies to all photos. Another good use, though, is to clean up filenames—either to remove odd characters (which can happen with web-downloaded files), or to remove characters not allowed in other filesystems, such as NTFS. In today’s how-to, I’ll show you how to do both of those things with some not-too-complicated Name Mangler queries.

Name Mangler 3 includes two entries in its Presets menu—Dumb Down for Windows and Trim Whitespace—that can fix many filename issues. This blog post explains some methods to use when those menu items aren’t enough.

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Posted in How To, Name Mangler, Products | 2 Comments »

How-to: Save Many Tricks license files forever

January 16th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

When you purchase our software directly from us (as opposed to in the App Store), you receive an email with a license file download link. Please download the file right away, as the download link expires in a few days. (If it didn’t expire, pirates could simply post the URL for anyone to use—forever.)

After downloading, double-click the downloaded file to license the associated app; you should see the license file window appear:

Both Peter and I prefer to these license files over serial numbers for many reasons (they seem more personal, they don’t require copy-and-paste and app switching, etc.), but there is one downside: Many users aren’t sure where to keep a copy of the file, to ease migrating to a new machine, or just for safekeeping. It turns out it’s actually very easy to back up these files…

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Moom 2.3.3 released

December 20th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths

Just in time for the holidays (as the developer side of the App Store is closed for a week, starting on the 22nd), Moom 2.3.3 has been released for both App Store and direct customers.

This update fixes a few minor issues (detailed in the release notes) including one often-reported problem: Moom couldn’t properly restore saved Chrome browser windows. Version 2.3.3 works fine with Chrome, at least based on our testing with a few users who reported the problem. (The prior behavior wasn’t due to a bug in Moom, but rather, the unconventional manner in which Chrome windows are created.)

App Store customers can get the update by looking at the Updates tab in the App Store application; direct customers can get it by selecting Check for Updates from the Moom menu.

Posted in Moom, Products | 1 Comment »

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

December 16th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths

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 Lion, the Witch, and the Escape key

December 15th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths

Early in 2011, as we were testing our apps with the Lion developer previews, Peter and I noticed something odd with Witch in Lion: some, but not all, of our Macs were unable to dismiss the Witch switcher panel via the Escape key. Peter dug into Witch’s code, and could find no reason for this, so then we started looking at the operating system itself. What we found is that the problem is indeed in Lion, and it’s related to Front Row (which, ironically enough, isn’t in Lion).

In a nutshell, Lion is reserving the Command-Escape keystroke to activate Front Row, even though there’s no Front Row to activate. So if you use Command-Tab to activate Witch, and then press Escape to cancel the window, Lion sees a Command-Escape keypress, and captures it—Witch never sees it, and its switcher panel isn’t dismissed. (If you disabled Front Row in 10.6, or remapped its activation keys, and then upgraded to Lion, you’re probably not having this problem. But if you did use Command-Escape for Front Row, you’ll want to use this fix.) We filed an Apple bug report on this back in March of 2011, but it’s still open and unresolved.

To fix this problem, we’ve created a simple little application, Escape Key Liberator. Usage couldn’t be much easier: download and mount the disk image, then launch the program (right from the disk image; it’s fine). You’ll be greeted by this incredibly obvious dialog:

Click the Liberate button, then quit Escape Key Liberator. Now comes the only slightly annoying portion of the process: you must logout and login for the change to take effect.

But after that task is done, you should once again be able to use the Escape key to dismiss the Witch switcher panel. You can then delete (or zip and archive, for possible future use on another Mac) the Escape Key Liberator disk image; it’s a one-trick pony, and its trick is done.

(Note: If you’re the kind of person who prefers replacing the transmission in your car yourself, instead of taking the car to the shop, read on for instructions on freeing your Escape key without the ease of a couple of mouse clicks.)

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Moom wins an Eddy!

December 5th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

Today we learned that Moom has won a 2011 Macworld Editor’s Choice award, better known as an Eddy. Quite frankly, we’re stunned, grateful, and thrilled at earning this award. Moom was our first completely new product as a team after the relaunch of Many Tricks, and to have it be so well received makes us both feel incredibly good.

It also says something for the nature of “indie” development—Moom really started as nothing more than a hunch and a feeling. Peter got busy coding, and a couple days later, we had the beginnings of something that we thought might be useful. We then spent a bunch of time working on the details, including the name, the user interface, and the feature set, to try to turn the hunch into something that we’d both be proud of.

When we shipped Moom 1.0, we were very happy, but not just because it got a great reception from those who tried it. What really made us happy was the amazing quality of the feedback we received from those who used Moom. We got so many amazing ideas from so many users that we were able to release Moom 2 (as a free update for everyone) within three months of the release of Moom 1.0. (And yes, we’ve got a ton of feedback to take into account as we think about Moom 3.0!)

In addition, we received (and continue to receive) words of praise and thanks for what Moom has done for users’ productivity, and we love that—because that’s the real reason we’re in this business: We love helping you all do what you do, regardless of how you use your Macs.

So to all of you who have helped Moom become so incredibly successful, thank you very much. This Eddy award is a direct reflection of your feelings about Moom, and we’re deeply thankful for your support of our efforts.

Posted in Company News, Moom, Products | 8 Comments »

Displaperture 1.2.2 now rounds like a Lion

November 29th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

Displaperture 1.2.2 is a very minor update; the only change is that it can now use settings as low as four pixels, down from seven. (Four pixels matches the rounding you’ll see on all window corners in Lion.) Note that this build now requires 10.6 or newer, and only works on Intel-powered Macs. (Displaperture 1.1 is available for those on older versions of Mac OS X and/or on PowerPC Macs.)

Posted in Displaperture, Products | 1 Comment »

Usher 1.1.4—for direct customers only—released

November 23rd, 2011 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

We’ve released Usher 1.1.4, but only for those who purchased it directly from us.

Why not update the Mac App Store version of Usher, too? We’d love to, but when we submitted the update, Apple raised some issues with some of Usher’s functionality (not new functionality; just newly-raised issues).

While we hope we’ll be able to update MAS Usher in the near future, we can’t set a timeline for such an update, nor can we say for certain what features may or may not be in that update. Sorry to be vague about this, but the situation is still in flux. Once we know the final outcome, we’ll post a follow-up explaining exactly what will happen with MAS Usher going forward.

So what’s new in 1.1.4? Mainly a number of small bug fixes and usability improvements. About the most-visible change is the addition of a Batch Rename entry in the Usher menu, to prevent accidental batch renaming when selecting more than one movie. For the rest of the fixes, see Usher’s release notes page.

As always (for direct customers only, again), you can get the update via in-app updating, or through Usher’s web page.

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

November 16th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths

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.

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Butler 4.1.12 released

November 10th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

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 »

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