Leech 1.1.1, also available on macZOT

May 19th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

Here’s another minor Leech update, which fulfills three more user requests — namely host-specific limiting of concurrent downloads; automatic clearing of the history when Leech quits; and private downloading, which means anonymized download names in Leech’s main window and omitting downloads from the history.

And today is the perfect day to give Leech a try, by the way, because it’s macZOT’s promo of the day. So get Leech now and save 48% — this offer is only valid today.

Leech 1.1

May 15th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

After a week of gathering feedback for the initial release, here’s Leech 1.1. We’re pretty sure you’ll like this update.

The most important improvement, in our opinion, is browser integration. Before releasing Leech 1.0, we weren’t sure if doing this was actually a good idea, because Safari doesn’t have any official plug-in interface, which makes each and every Safari enhancement a more or less dangerous hack. But your feedback was quite clear, so we changed our collective mind and implemented seamless integration for Safari, Camino, and OmniWeb by means of a SIMBL plug-in. If you’re using things like PithHelmet or 1password, SIMBL is already installed on your Mac. And we certainly made an effort to make this as failure-safe as possible. So go ahead, enable browser integration from within Leech, and all your browser downloads will be handed off to Leech automatically.

Further improvements are a rule system to define individual download folders as well as applications to open complete downloads based on a given download’s file type and host; a searchable downloads history I’m particularly proud of; various minor improvements and bug fixes; and a French localization.

Oh, and if you have been using another download manager up to now, check out our “Switch!” offer on Leech’s product page.

Safari Size Guardian 1.0; Mother’s Day

May 10th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

While working on browser integration for Leech (the update will be available as early as next week), I came across a solution for another issue that’s been bugging me for years: unsolicited JavaScript window resizing in Safari. So if you — like me — despise web sites that think they know your browser window partialities better than you do, have a look at this little hack named Safari Guardian.

In other news, tomorrow is Mother’s Day in quite a lot of countries all over the planet. If you’re still looking for a gift, have a look at macZOT’s Mother’s Day Sixpack, which includes TubiTunes. (You can also buy that SixPack for yourself. We won’t tell.)

Leech 1.0

May 7th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

We’ve hinted at this before, and now it’s here: Check out Leech, our new download manager.

Leech gives you complete control over your downloads. You can queue, pause and resume downloads, download from password-protected servers and store your passwords in your system-wide, secure keychain. And you won’t have to worry about downloads that were disrupted by a crashing browser ever again.

Have a look at Leech’s shiny new product page for more info.

Making Room (Open-With Manager 0.9.2)

April 30th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

While preparing for the release of an entirely new application next week, we realized that this site’s current homepage layout had reached its limits. So we’re changing it, and in doing so, we’re taking the opportunity to give easier access to some minor projects, which we call baubleries.

What are these baubleries? Key Codes has always been accessible from our homepage, and we’ve blogged about Displaperture and the more or less obsolete Menu Bar Tint a few times.

But you may have never heard about Open-With Manager before — despite the fact that this little critter is roughly three years old. So if you’re interested in a utility that lets you edit the list of file types a given application thinks it can open (which, in turn, influences the Finder’s “Open with” context menu and the application’s drag & drop behavior in the Dock), check it out. Just make sure you’ve read the warning at the bottom of the product page before using it.

Status Report: Witch Shareware Transition

April 24th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

We have sent out Witch licenses to all donators we found in our database. So if you have donated for Witch but haven’t received your license yet, let us know. We know that some of you are still missing out, because some of those license e-mails bounced back.

Fun fact: Witch made more money on its first shareware day than it did during all those donationware years. I guess it’s safe to say that — while being a beautiful concept in theory — donationware isn’t exactly the best way to get rich.

yFlicks: 50% Off, Instant Replay

April 23rd, 2008 by Peter Maurer

A funny thing happened yesterday, when yFlicks was promoted on macZOT: yFlicks drew so much attention, it killed macZOT’s bandwidth. In fact, they are still struggling to stay online. And as a result, some of you couldn’t get the rebate.

What do we do about this? We do an instant replay. Get yFlicks now — the 50% rebate is available for another day. And don’t forget that buying yFlicks means getting TubiTunes for free.

Witch 2.0

April 22nd, 2008 by Peter Maurer

There’s a problem with Witch: In terms of usage, it’s a simple utility; and there’s not a lot of spiffy new features we would want to add to its straightforward functionality. But under the hood, things change. There’s a lot of things you can or even have to do to make sure Witch remains reliable when faced with future versions of Mac OS X. That’s why Witch 2.0 may seem like a small step to you, but judging from the developer’s point of view, it’s not.

Now, you know how these things go: Whenever someone tells you how he is working really hard for something, there’s a certain chance he’ll end up asking you for money. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do today — after having thought about it for months.

Witch has been distributed as donationware for years, and it was a great time. I loved how users who just couldn’t afford paying more than $2 were able to donate those $2 and feel good about it. I know I always did. But in the long run, it doesn’t really work. If I’m supposed to keep Witch up to date, it will have to be worthwhile; and donationware doesn’t cut it.

Too many users misunderstand my idea of donationware as freeware, and this problem is aggravated by the fact that most Mac news sites and software update providers aren’t willing to make a difference between donationware and freeware. I’ve argued with some of them for years, to no avail. And I understand their point of view. Donationware is hardly an unequivocal term; and if I were to sell a magazine or make a news site successful, I’d probably prefer to allure customers with huge freeware collections, too.

So let’s get rid of the uncertainty that always surrounds donationware. Witch 2.0 is shareware, and you’re expected to pay €9.95 if you plan on using it regularly — unless you’ve already donated for Witch, that is. For us, appreciating past donations from our most loyal supporters is a question of honor.

We’ll start sending out Witch licenses to those who have supported Witch in the past during the next few days. But if you can’t wait, or if you get the feeling we might have forgotten to add you to our list, feel free to drop us a message. For example, I remember receiving some donations via snail mail years ago, and I’m not sure if I can still attribute those to e-mail addresses.


Whew. Now, what are the actual changes in Witch 2.0 — apart from that fancy new license field in Witch’s preference pane? As I’ve said, you won’t even notice most of the changes right now, and in addition to those under-the-hood things, there’s one feature we really wanted to add, but couldn’t: full spaces support. Witch appears in all of your spaces now, but it remains agnostic of which space a given window is in. We just haven’t found a reliable way to gain that piece of information yet — it’s as if the mighty Apple doesn’t want applications to know which space they live in.

But there’s also good news: We’ve added shortcuts for jumping to windows directly (see “Behavior” > “Windows List” > “Show shortcut badges”). So if you want to activate the 7th window in Witch’s list, type “6”, and you’re there. (We’re starting with “0” for the current window.)

And we’re very happy to report that we’ve fixed one of the meanest bugs ever — namely the one that sometimes garbled the windows list’s sorting order when sorting by window activity, a.k.a. “the iTerm bug”.

yFlicks 3.3.1; TubiTunes 1.0.1; Desktop Curtain 1.1

April 22nd, 2008 by Peter Maurer

We have four updates for you today, and we’ll divide these into two blog entries, because the fourth one needs more detailed explaining.

Let’s start with these two: Just in time to meet today’s 50%-off macZOT promo, both yFlicks and TubiTunes are now capable of downloading the higher-quality MPEG-4 file for a given movie from YouTube, if available. Other than that, we’ve just squashed some bugs — including a particularly embarrassing one: TubiTunes’s automatic update checker didn’t actually check for updates automatically.

What are the other two updates? Desktop Curtain is now ready to deal with multiple screens and spaces. And Witch 2.0 is detailed here.

Use CoverFlow in 10.5 while supporting 10.4

March 20th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

When implementing coverflow in yFlicks, I was faced with a challenge that made my head ache for a while. I wanted this to be based on CoreAnimation, and I wanted yFlicks to still run on Mac OS X 10.4.

What I’ve eventually come up with is a plug-in bundle named PMFlowView, which is only loaded and used when yFlicks runs on Mac OS X 10.5. It communicates with the actual application by means of a protocol that will sound very familiar to anyone who’s ever used a NSTableView, and since it’s a stand-alone component, it can be used with virtually any application.

If this sounds appealing to you, have a look at PMFlowView’s essential header file; and if you’re interested in using PMFlowView in one of your own projects, feel free to contact us.