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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

The cat lion is out of the bag!

October 21st, 2010 by Rob Griffiths

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…

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Usher 1.0.1 addresses mkv and iTunes video issues

October 17th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths

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.

Usher 1.0 ushers in a new era in movie management

October 14th, 2010 by Rob Griffiths

Usher iconWe’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.

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A Butler named Alfred

September 24th, 2010 by Peter Maurer

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.

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