In case you missed the news yesterday, Apple held a special event, focused on the Mac.
Aside from introducing a Mac I’ve been waiting for for seemingly forever—the 11.6″ MacBook Air—Apple also gave a very brief sneak peek at Mac OS X Lion, coming to a Mac near you in the summer of 2011.
For Peter and I, this was an interesting day. Neither of us were expecting the next major Mac OS X release to come so soon. And certainly neither of us were expecting it to include an app store…
When we sent the initial release of Usher out the door, we knew there would probably be a few bugs—this is a large and complex program, and despite the large test group, it seems you can’t always catch everything before release.
Such was the case here…for most people, Usher worked perfectly. There were a few folks with some issues, however, so Peter’s been burning the weekend hours addressing those issues. Instead of waiting for Monday, we thought we’d push this update out today, to get it in everyone’s hands as quickly as possible.
A few users reported that Usher wouldn’t see their iTunes videos; Usher 1.0.1 should fix that problem. We also had reports from users with large collections of movies in non-native QuickTime formats (e.g. mkv files) about incredibly slow initial import times. Usher 1.0.1 includes much better logic for handling these movie formats (which are very slow to work with in QuickTime), so the initial import stage should go much faster.
You can read about a couple other small changes on the Usher release notes page. You can get the new version via in-app updating, or directly from the Usher web page.
We’re thrilled—beyond thrilled, actually—to announce the release of Usher 1.0 today. Usher is Many Tricks’ movie management and viewing application. If you collect videos—be they from cell phones, digital video cameras, internet downloads, ripped DVDs, or wherever, Usher is the tool to help you gain control over your collection.
The list of features is immense; check out the Usher web page to get a sense for its capabilities. We’ve really worked hard to make this a solid release, as yFlicks was a much-loved and much-used program that, sadly, stopped working a couple of major OS X releases ago. While Usher is the spiritual successor to yFlicks, the number of new and/or greatly improved features, along with the completely revamped interface, make it essentially a brand-new program. That’s why we tested Usher with our largest-ever group of beta testers—Usher is a large, complex program, and we wanted it to be as issue-free as possible.
Keep reading to see a small sampling of Usher’s features, and for full information on purchasing or upgrading to (including free upgrades for many yFlicks users) Usher.
Preface: The following is not strictly company or product news. So if you’re the kind of visitor who feels his time is wasted whenever we show up in your RSS reader without providing cold, hard info, please feel free to skip this rather lengthy blog entry.
There’s a new kid in town, as the Eagles once put it so aptly. A new Mac {hot key/web search/iTunes control/what have you} utility that attempts to make a Mac user’s life easier and more productive. The name is Alfred, and from what I see on its product page, it seems to be a well-designed application.
And in a lot of ways, it’s, shall we say, a tribute to Butler—even more so than You Control, for instance, ever was. Now, I’m not complaining about that. On the contrary, I feel honored, and I can see why a Butler-related theme is a somewhat obvious choice for that kind of application. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the lack of significant Butler updates over the last few years were part of the motivation that brought the aforementioned new kid to fruition, much like a temporary lack of updates for Riccardo Ettore’s otherwise excellent TypeIt4Me was one of the key reasons for me to create Textpander (which, of course, is known as Smile Software’s TextExpander these days).
So despite what people might think, I have no issue whatsoever with their decision to create an application that shares a lot of its functionality with Butler, and outfit that with a name and an icon that remind me of Butler as well. If anything, I consider this new competitor a wake-up call. Yes, it’s high time for Butler to evolve. And trust me, we love the honorable sportsmanship that’s customary in the Mac software world.
But there’s one thing that got to me, and that’s the one thing they couldn’t possibly have been aware of.
The name.
Normally we have Minor Update Mondays around these parts, but hey, delays are unavoidable at times—so welcome to our first Touch-up Tuesday instead!
The highlights of today’s updates include (but check out the release notes page for each app for the full story)…
Name Mangler 2.2.3 adds the ability to prepend (as well as the existing append) a file name when numbering sequentially or using a terms list.
It also includes a new “Replace All” setting in a confirmation dialog; this new feature owes its existence to user Mike B., who requested it and demonstrated its need by including the image seen at right.
Yes, that’s a small heavy bottle resting on the Return key, so that it can be automatically pressed to dismiss the dialog every time it appears! Time to retire the bottle, Mike.
In addition to the above, we’re still hard at work on both Usher and our new time-tracking app; stay tuned for news on both fronts in the near future…and yes, work continues on Butler 5 as well!
A couple days back, we posted a hint on using Witch on Macs with multiple displays. The hint explained how to use Terminal to make Witch appear on the display containing the mouse, instead of on the main display.
The feedback from this hidden feature was quite strong, so we decided to make it much simpler to implement. In Witch 3.5.4 (update via in-app updating, or from the Witch page), a new drop-down menu on the Behavior tab now allows you to choose where the Witch panel appears.
If you use multiple displays, try this out—you may find, as I do, that Witch is much easier to use when it appears on the screen you’re actively working on.
Update: This hint is no longer necessary, as this functionality is now built into Witch (as of version 3.5.4). Only use this hint if you’re intentionally running an older version of Witch.
If you use Witch and have more than one display on your Mac (as I do), you may sometimes find it frustrating when Witch pops up on your main screen while you’re working on your second screen.
This bugged me enough that, at some point in Witch’s history, I asked Peter to allow the Witch panel to appear on whichever display contained the mouse pointer. Given how crowded Witch’s preferences already were, and that we weren’t certain this would be widely used, Peter created it as a hidden preference…which I then forgot to document in our release notes. Whoops!
I use Witch like this regularly now, and had forgotten it wasn’t standard behavior until I received an email this morning, asking about support for multiple displays. So for those of you who would like to make use of this hidden Witch feature, here’s how to do it.
Now when you activate Witch, it will appear on the screen containing the mouse pointer. It took me a few minutes to get used to the change, but once I did, it feels like the way Witch should work on a multi-monitor setup. (If you try this and decide you don’t like it, you can reverse things by repeating all the above steps, but change TRUE to FALSE in the Terminal command.)
We’re also looking at possibly adding an option to show Witch’s panel on all attached displays, but we need to test it and see if it slows down the interface too much.
Are you curious as to how much time you spend in the various Mac OS X apps you run? Or do you bill by the hour, and you really need to know this information? We’re developing a (currently-nameless) application to do just that, and we’re looking for some testers to give us feedback on what we’ve come up with so far.
If you’re interested in helping test, please drop me an email, and I’ll add your name to the list of testers.
This new app will require 10.5 or 10.6, so please only reply if you’re running one of those two Mac OS X releases.
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!
Many Tricks