Some ideas for your Donation Day savings

December 20th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Update: It seems Apple has ended our App Store pricing somewhat early; all App Store prices are back to their normal levels. (This probably happened in preparation for the shutdown that begins at midnight tonight, Pacific time).

Our own store’s schedule remains unchanged, however: you can buy for $1 through tomorrow morning.

Now that Donation Day is live in most of the world, we thought we’d make the task of donating easier by providing some links to various charities (a few people have asked us for such). Note that the intent of Donation Day is for everyone to donate to a charity of their choosing, thereby perhaps getting some money to charities that don’t usually get much visibility. However, we realize that some people may prefer a bit of guidance on the subject.

So with that said, here are some links to help start your charitable giving campaign…

Hopefully this list gives you a nice start at finding a home for all that cash you saved on your Many Tricks’ purchases today!

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Announcing Many Tricks’ Donation Day

December 19th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

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

How-to: Add a teleporter to your multi-display Mac

December 7th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

If you’ve got a multi-display Mac, then you know what a drag it can be to drag things. When you have a window at the lower right corner of your right display, and you need it at the upper left corner of your left display, that’s a lot of pixels to traverse. One excellent solution to this problem is Moom, our window management tool. Amongst its other capabilities, Moom lets you easily jump a window across displays via keyboard or mouse.

But what if it’s not a window, but text, that you need to drag—say from a word processing window to an email window? Moom won’t be much help there. Or you need to drag a file, to drop it on another application or into a Finder folder?

Again, Moom can’t help you with that task. But our app Keymo certainly can!

Keymo is an app that lets you control the mouse pointer with the keyboard, and it bears some resemblance to Moom. While some of its users have physical handicaps that make using the mouse difficult, Keymo has some talents that appeal to everyone.

One of those skills is its ability to instantly jump the mouse pointer between displays…and if you can send the pointer between displays, well, anything you happen to be dragging will come right along with it when it goes. So read on to see how you can use Keymo to greatly ease the drag of dragging.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Keymo, Moom, Products | Comments Off on How-to: Add a teleporter to your multi-display Mac

Witch and RAM usage, both real and not so real

November 28th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Witch, our window switching application, is designed to be always-running (what good is a window switcher if it’s not active?). The program itself exists as two components: the user interface, where you modify Witch’s settings, and the background process that watches for the Witch activation keystrokes and builds the list when activated. The background process is named witchdaemon, and some users have emailed us with concerns about the RAM usage of this background daemon.

The emails we receive come in two flavors:

  1. Why is Witch using so much real RAM?
  2. Why is Witch reserving gigabytes of virtual memory (VSIZE in top)?

Read on for the details on both real and virtual RAM usage by Witch—the explanations are somewhat detailed and technical (especially relative to virtual memory), so put on your geek glasses before proceeding.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Products, Witch | Comments Off on Witch and RAM usage, both real and not so real

Avoid a Mountain Lion bug that can affect Name Mangler

October 31st, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

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

Moom and Tweetbot for Mac

October 19th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

If you use Moom and Tweetbot, get Tweetbot 1.1, as it addresses the issues discussed below. This article remains here for historical purposes only.

There’s been quite an explosion of Twitter discussion about Tweetbot for Mac and Moom this morning. The key issue, of course, is that Moom doesn’t work with Tweetbot for Mac. Instead of trying to carry on numerous 140 character conversations explaining the issue, we thought we’d use this blog post to explain exactly what the issue is, what we’ve done as a short-term fix, and what the long-term fix should be.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Moom, Products | Comments Off on Moom and Tweetbot for Mac

Butler 4.1.14 released

October 12th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Butler 4.1.14 is now out, and if you’re running OS X 10.8.2, it’s a very highly recommended update. That’s because the main purpose of this release is to work around a bug that Apple introduced into inter-application communication in 10.8.2. The result of this bug is that Butler would appear to hang at times, typically when it was talking or listening to iTunes.

We’ve worked around that bug, and fixed a couple of other things, and the result is Butler 4.1.14. Get it via in-app updating, or by downloading it directly from the Butler page here.

Obligatory footnote: Yes, we’re still planning on releasing Butler 5. We don’t yet have a beta or release date, but as soon as we have either, we’ll make sure everyone knows about it.

Posted in Butler, Products | Comments Off on Butler 4.1.14 released

Moom 3.0.1 adds retina support

October 2nd, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Hot on the heels of the retinaized Witch comes Moom 3.0.1 with the same high resolution support for the stunning retina Macs. There are also a number of other bug fixes in this release, so it’s highly recommended for all Moom users.

Direct purchasers can get the update via in-app updating, or by downloading a new version from the Moom product page. App Store users should soon (if not already) see the update in the Updates section of the App Store application.

Note: Because this is a bug fix release, we were able to update the App Store version of Moom, too. Long term, barring changes in Apple’s policies, App Store users will want to (for free) migrate to the direct sales version. Here’s how (and why).

Posted in Moom, Products | Comments Off on Moom 3.0.1 adds retina support

Witch 3.9.2 brings retina display support

October 1st, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Witch 3.9.2 has been released, in both the App Store and via our web site. The big news in this release is support for retina Macs, along with a workaround for duplicate entries for Total Finder windows in the window switcher. We’ve also done our best to make Witch work better with Desktops in Mountain Lion, and fixed a glitch that could prevent preview images from displaying.

Direct purchasers can get the update via in-app updating, or by downloading a new version from the Witch product page. App Store users should soon (if not already) see the update in the Updates section of the App Store application.

Note: Because this is a bug fix release, we were able to update the App Store version of Witch. Long term, barring changes in Apple’s policies, App Store users will want to (for free) migrate to the direct sales version. Here’s how (and why).

Witch 3.9.2 requires 10.7 or newer, due to changes in Xcode. If you’re running 10.6.8, you’ll want to remain with Witch 3.9.1. We’ll do our best to bring back 10.6.8 support in a future update, if we can.

Posted in Products, Witch | Comments Off on Witch 3.9.2 brings retina display support

Key Codes 2.0 released

September 27th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Key Codes 2.0 is now available via the Mac App Store and directly from our web site. This free utility is of interest mainly to developers, and anyone else who’s curious about the actual codes their keyboards send to the OS.

Version 2.0 of Key Codes is Many Tricks’ first retinaized application (Moom and Witch will be next, and will hopefully be approved for sale shortly; stay tuned for news on that front.)

Beyond support for retina display Macs, Key Codes 2.0 will keep the last entry visible as you scroll back through history, and includes a handy Clear button. Direct versions now include Sparkle, for easy in-app updating.

Posted in Key Codes, Products | Comments Off on Key Codes 2.0 released

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