Many Tricks
yFlicks 3.0.3 squashes just one little bug, namely a display glitch in the English localization’s “Advanced” preferences tab.
yFlicks 3.0.3
December 13th, 2007 by Peter MaureryFlicks 3.0.2
December 10th, 2007 by Peter MaurerThis is just a small update to yFlicks, but it contains a lot of things we know you have been waiting for. First and foremost, it reduces the delays you’ve learned to hate when you were adding multiple files to your yFlicks library, and it does so dramatically. Movie metadata — such as preview images and movie durations — are now cached by a separate little helper process we call the “yflickscrawler”, so you don’t have to wait until yFlicks has digested all those new movies before doing anything else anymore.
There is also a new overlay slider control for movie previews, giving you the possibility to skim entire movies with minmal effort — without ever really having to open them.
And there are a lot more little improvments, but this one is kinda important for us, since we’re native German speakers and we’ve had a lot of friends asking for this: yFlicks now has a complete German localization.
Butler 4.1.4 Transient; yFlicks 3.0.1
November 26th, 2007 by Peter MaurerWe’re fixing a few bugs in both Butler and yFlicks today. Most importantly, we have solved the most unnerving Butler bug ever, which usually made Butler crash on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” while editing a configuration item in the main window’s Inspector. Thanks to everyone who helped us with this — it took us weeks to even get the slightest idea of what was going on.
We’d also like to thank those who helped us squash a couple of yFlicks bugs, including a smart group sorting issue that gave us reason to improve the library’s behind-the-scenes mechanisms quite significantly.
And just in case you haven’t noticed: We’re back with a fast and reliable webserver after living through a webserver nightmare last week, including the day yFlicks 3.0 was released. We’re not particularly keen on experiencing that kind of thrill again any time soon. And we are really sorry for any web site and e-mail hiccups that occured during the transition.
Our webserver refuses to serve
November 23rd, 2007 by Peter MaurerOur 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.
yFlicks 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.