Many Tricks
Our main webserver appears to be dead, and consequently, we’re in the middle of moving to a new server/provider. Meanwhile, we’re redirecting you to manytricks.de/fallback; and we would like to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.
Our webserver refuses to serve
November 23rd, 2007 by Peter MaureryFlicks 3
November 20th, 2007 by Peter MaurerThe new yFlicks 3 doesn’t just let you view and arrange movies in static groups — its versatile tags feature lets you categorize your movies any way you want. You can even tag your movie automatically by querying Amazon’s online movie database, which gives you the additional benefit of having the corresponding DVD cover art downloaded automatically. And once you’ve done so, creating smart groups based on your tags and subdividing those smart groups by tag values will let you browse your movie library by Genre, Actor, Director, MPAA Rating, or Year, for instance.
And if you’re a Front Row fan, you’ll love the fact that usher mode lets you access the full complexity of your yFlicks library via Front Row.
So head over to MUPromo and get it. It’s available there with a 40% introductory rebate. Only today.
Butler 4.1.3 Transient
November 7th, 2007 by Peter MaurerThis version of Butler fixes all issues with Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” we are currently aware of. Most importantly, fast user switching and related functionality are working once again — a user management change in Leopard had caused most of the Leopard issues users have been experiencing, although it hasn’t always been obvious.
Moreover, selecting menu items that are also submenu parents is back to working as expected (where applicable, e.g., menu items that represent a file system folder); and we’ve fixed several interface glitches.
So why do we call this a transient release? Why does it expire on January 1, 2008? Actually, we are working on Butler 5, which will run on Mac OS X 10.5 only and employ some of the exciting new features in Mac OS X that we haven’t been able to use up to now, since we’ve always supported Mac OS X versions as early as 10.2.8 with Butler.
And once this new version is released, we’d prefer a clear cut between Butler 4.1.2 (Mac OS X 10.2.8 through 10.4.x) and Butler 5 (Mac OS X 10.5 and newer). We’ll have to say more about this soon.
Meow, says the Leopard
October 26th, 2007 by Peter MaurerNow that the new cat is out of the bag, it’s time to have a look at how our applications cope with it. Here’s a preliminary overview:
Butler
• has issues with its built-in Fast User Switching replacement
• doesn’t draw its configuration subheaders correctly
Both issues will be addressed during the next few days.
Desktop Curtain
• doesn’t cover the part of the wallpaper that “shines through” the menu bar
Not sure how to fix this, cf. Non-Transparent Menu Bar.
Non-Transparent Menu Bar
• simply put: doesn’t work
We did actually have reason to believe that this would work during earlier beta stages of Mac OS X 10.5. However, the final Leopard’s menu bar is opaque, and instead of letting the background shine through, it draws a blurred copy of your wallpaper. We hate to waste source code, though, so we thought of something else we could do with this — see our next blog entry.
File List, Key Codes, Service Scrubber, Witch, yFlicks
• all of these seem to work fine
However, if you happen to encounter any Leopard-related bug that we didn’t find, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Thanks!
Apparel 1.0
August 8th, 2007 by Peter MaurerAdmit it: You’re dying to get a Butler shirt. Well, at least we were; and that’s why we decided to configure and order a couple of these at CafePress. Once we had done so, we thought to ourselves: The Butler icon does have its fans, so why not let them wear their favorite utility’s icon, too?
Thus, we proudly present Many Tricks Apparel, our own little apparel/mugs/whatnot store.
Oh, and those product prizes? They are CafePress’s base prizes — we don’t earn jack from anything sold through CafePress. But we would feel incredibly honored if you actually considered wearing our special little guy.
Buy Sofa Control
July 27th, 2007 by Peter MaurerApple ships a remote control with most of their computers. With only six buttons the Apple Remote is the ultimate in simple sophistication. The standard functionality, however, is limited to controlling just a couple of applications. Sofa Control breaks this limit. With Sofa Control you are able to control any application on your Mac and trigger whatever actions you like.
Now you might be wondering why we would recommend an application we’re not officially affiliated with. Here’s why: About a year ago, Sofa Control’s head developer, Martin Kahr, did something Apple forgot to do: He provided a framework named Remote Control Wrapper that made it ridiculously easy for 3rd-party applications to interface with the Apple Remote. So when we started thinking about adding remote control support to yFlicks, the decision to use Martin’s framework was more or less a no-brainer. It was rock-solid, it was elegant, and it was free.
However, we encountered one issue that — in our humble opinion — was worth fixing: There wasn’t any mechanism for managing situations where several applications using Martin’s framework would strive for access to the remote control. When we contacted Martin about this, we were delighted by his open-minded response and his willingness to work this out.
And that’s what we did. Together, we came up with a beautiful solution for this kind of race condition. And this solution doesn’t even require any additional work from 3rd-party developers. They just have to update their applications to the newest Remote Control Wrapper version.
Yesterday, Martin released said version, along with Sofa Control 2.1, which — hardly surprisingly — uses the Remote Control Wrapper framework, too. So now you can have yFlicks and Sofa Control work seamlessly together, because actually, that new Remote Control Wrapper version has been built into yFlicks since yFlicks 2.0.