New support option: discussion groups

December 16th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths

In the interest of expanding the available support options for our users, we’ve created discussion groups (which can be read online, or subscribed to via email or RSS) for all of our products. The main advantage of the discussion groups is that users can speak with other users, which isn’t possible via our existing email or trouble ticket support systems.

We’ve set the groups up via Google Groups, mainly because they’ve got a really good group management system. If you have a Google account, you can sign up for each group via the web, and set your preferences (email delivery, etc.) as you wish. If you don’t have a Google account, you can only sign up via email, and you can’t set any preferences. (This page explains what you can and can’t do in Google Groups if you don’t have a Google account.)

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Name Mangler 2.3.1 and Witch 3.5.6

December 8th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

While we’ve had Minor update Mondays and Touch-up Tuesdays in the past, it turns out that Wednesday isn’t very amenable to cute blog title naming schemes (“Wicked Wednesday” just didn’t seem right). So I’ve forgone the fanciful title this time out, which was possible mainly because we have just two minor updates today.

Witch 3.5.6 includes a few bug fixes and a couple new hidden prefs (to disable the fade-out effect for the panel, and to disable the overlay icon for minimized windows). Full details on the release notes page, as usual.

Name Mangler 2.3.1 will be of interest to those who rename lots—as in thousands and tens of thousands—of files at a time. Previous versions of Name Mangler would crash if you had selected thousands of files in Finder or Path Finder, and then clicked Name Mangler’s “Populate with…” icons. Even if you got your long list into Name Mangler, it would then crash during the renaming process. Both of these issues are fixed in this release; you can read the release notes if you want, but really, those are the only two changes.

As always, updates are available via in-app updating (enable this via the Updates tab in each program’s Preferences), or by downloading the programs from their respective web pages.

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Time Sink 1.1.1

December 1st, 2010 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

Sorry for the emergency one-day minor update, but we broke a bit of code in yesterday’s Time Sink 1.1 release. Unfortunately, that bit of code controlled auto-export, which is something of a key feature. So we’ve pushed 1.1.1 live via in-app updating (and on the site, of course).

If you’re using Time Sink, please update to 1.1.1 to avoid the auto-export issue in Time Sink 1.1. (There are no other changes in this version.)

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Time Sink updated with many new features

November 30th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

Today we released Time Sink 1.1, adding a bunch of useful little features to our activity tracking application. You can get the new version via in-app updates (Time Sink > Check for Updates, or enable automatic checking in the Updates section of Time Sink’s Preferences), or by downloading the full version from the Time Sink web page.

So what’s new in Time Sink 1.1? Quite a few little usability enhancements:

  • Floating time boxOn the Report tab in Preferences, you can enable a floating text box that shows the date/time at the current mouse position when viewing the Activity Report in Time Lapse mode. Check the box labeled ‘Show time at mouse location in Time Lapse mode’ to see this floating box.
  • The brand-new Export tab in Preferences contains the export settings that were previously on the Reports tab. In addition, for those who use auto-export, you can now specify what time of day to run the auto-export. Even better, though, is that you can tell Time Sink to only export data that’s been gathered since the last export—enable this mode, and you’ll have a series of day-by-day reports, each covering just one day.

  • The time barWhen working with the Activity Report window, selecting any subset of your total history will display a new ‘time bar’ at the bottom of the window—it’s the blue bar in the image at right.

    You can drag that bar around to easily see the same time interval for any portion of Time Sink’s history, or drag either end of the bar to to change the displayed time interval. The bar will vanish when you remove the time limits in the Activity Report window.

  • Entries in the Activity Report window now have contextual menus. Control-click (or right-click or two-finger tap etc.) to see the menus; you’ll find options to expand or collapse the view (as you can do in the Time Sink Organizer window using the triangles), along with the same options you get in the Time Sink Organizer’s contextual menus.
  • Two new contextual menu entries allow you to either quit a program or bring it to the foreground—very handy for those times when you realize you left an app running, or decide you want to do something in an app.

The response to Time Sink thus far has been very positive, and we think these new features make it all that much better. Time Sink is $19, and has a fully-functional two week demo period.

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Name Mangler and Time Sink do the bundle thing

November 29th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths

If you’re hunting for a Cyber Monday deal, here are two that involve our products…one of which is good just for today, the other of which starts today:

  • Time Sink is one of the five apps you can get for $20 in the MacUpdate CyberMonday mini bundle. Act fast, though, as this deal expires at midnight (Eastern time) tonight.
  • Name Mangler is one of the 10 apps in the $50 MacPromo bundle. You don’t have to run to the checkout lane quite as quickly for this deal, as it runs through December 31st.

We think both Time Sink and Name Mangler make excellent stocking stuffers for friends and family, so buy early and buy often!

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Subscribe to category-specific news feeds

November 28th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths

For those relaxing by kicking back and reading our blog on a Sunday morning, here’s a little bit of blog-related news…

If you’d like to keep up with all the news on your favorite Many Tricks’ programs—but don’t necessarily want to read all the posts in the blog (via our full news feed, for instance)—here’s some good news: you can now subscribe to a specific category’s news feed.

Say you only want to read about posts concerning Witch. First use the Categories pop-up in the sidebar to select Witch, which will display all posts in that category. To subscribe to the Witch category, just click the Subscribe to the RSS feed for the ‘Witch’ category link that appears immediately below the “All posts in the ‘Witch’ category” header.

Your default newsreader (Safari, Mail, NetNewsWire, etc.) should then open with a new subscription to all our posts about Witch. Repeat this process for each category you’re interested in following.

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Another set of Tuesday Touch-ups

November 2nd, 2010 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

While many companies may save fixes and new functionality in their apps for weeks or months at a time, that’s not how we roll here at Many Tricks. Instead, we’d rather get new and/or improved stuff out to you as quickly as possible, but still on a regularly-scheduled basis. It used to be Minor Update Mondays, but because Mondays are seemingly always awful, we’ve lately migrated to Touch-up Tuesdays (subject to change, of course!). This being a Tuesday, we have a few such updates for all of you today…

  • Name Mangler 2.3: We’ve added support for user input in Advanced mode; this allows some user interaction with droplets, for example. To accept user input, use the new [prompt "Text user will see"] action. You can read more about this in Name Mangler’s in-app help. [Release notes]
  • Time Sink 1.0.1: Fixed a problem where certain dialogs would appear behind other windows when Time Sink was used in menu bar mode, thereby blocking Time Sink from capturing data. [Release notes]
  • Usher 1.0.4: A few bug fixes, including one that would cause Usher’s movie processor to stop while the Info window was onscreen. [Release notes]

As usual, you can download the full apps from each program’s page, or just check for updates using the built-in updaters within each program.

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Where does the time go? Time Sink knows!

October 28th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

Usher iconHave you ever found yourself sitting at your Mac at the end of the day, looking at the clock and saying “Geez, where did the day go?” I know I have—especially back when I was running macosxhints.com and holding a full-time day job at the same time.

It was during this period that I mentioned to Peter, almost in passing, “Gee, it’d be cool if there were an app that sort of kept track of what I was doing on my Mac.”

The next day, in typical Peter fashion, my inbox contained a rough-but-functional program that did just that: tracked my open applications. I don’t even remember what it was called, and I have only the most basic recollection of what it looked like…but it worked. At that time, Peter was working by himself, and decided he didn’t have the time or inclination to do much more with the app, so there it sat.

Fast forward many years, and as we were looking for a product to help broaden the Many Tricks product line, Peter mentioned the old usage tracking program. After some back-and-forth, we both felt it was a natural addition to our suite of utilities. The rough code was smoothed out, features were added, beta testers provided feedback, and out of all that, we’re thrilled to announce Time Sink, Many Tricks’ newest application.

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Time for another Touch-up Tuesday

October 26th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

That’s right, another Touch-up Tuesday, featuring some minor updates to a few of the apps on our menu. This week’s updated delicacies include the following entrees…

  • Leech 2.0.7: We’ve updated the version of SIMBL we bundle, so setting up browser integration works again on Mac OS X 10.5.x machines. There was one other small fix (a localization issue). [Release notes]
  • Name Mangler 2.2.4: After investigating a couple reports of Name Mangler not working, we figured out that users were unchecking all filters. This would essentially disable Name Mangler. So as of 2.2.4, you can’t do that any more. Also fixed a bug that caused the Change Case mode to fail when renaming files containing accented or any other decomposable characters. [Release notes]
  • Usher 1.0.3: Usher received the most attention this week; make sure you check out the release notes page for the full scoop. The highlights include a new Add to Library menu item (to make it simpler to add things to your library), the addition of Date Created to List view mode, and a new entry in the contextual menu that lets you quickly mark a movie—or group of movies—as watched (or unwatched) without having to first open them.

As always, updates are available via in-app updating, or you can download the full programs from their respective web pages.

If you think these minor changes are exciting, make sure you come back Thursday, when we’ll be adding a brand new item to the Many Tricks’ menu! We’ve been sampling it ourselves for a few months now, and we think it’s a delicious addition to our existing menu…er…product line—we can’t wait to see what you all think of it, too!

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Usher 1.0.2 adds Aperture support

October 21st, 2010 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

This update to Usher includes one major new feature, and a number of improvements and bug fixes. The major new feature is basic Aperture support—Usher will now find and show videos in Aperture, as it does for iPhoto and iTunes. The only limitation is that we’re unable to bring across the video keywords, as we can do with iPhoto videos.

We’ve also added New Folder buttons to dialogs (where it makes sense, as when selecting library folders), and expanded the in-app help file to cover Supplementary Folders, which are a very cool Usher feature.

There are some other minor bug fixes and improvements, too—read the release notes for the full scoop.

As always, the update is available via in-app updating, or by downloading the full program from Usher’s web page.

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