A.K.A. Non-Translucent

August 3rd, 2007 by Peter Maurer

After Macworld’s Rob Griffiths had weighed in on Mac OS X 10.5’s menu bar and mentioned Non-Transparent Menu Bar (NTMB) in passing, we learned two things from readers’ feedback:

  1. We should have called this Non-Translucent Menu Bar. Oh well.
  2. Users like options. More specifically, a lot of people seemed to like the idea of a menu bar that is opaque when the mouse is hovering over it, but gets more translucent (see? — we’re willing to learn) when the mouse is busy somewhere else.

So here we are, offering you yet another version of a product that will hopefully be rendered unnecessary once the operating system it’s written for is released. With this new version, you can build your own color gradient for NTMB’s menu bar mask (think rainbow!) as well as control the menu bar’s opacity depending on mouse position. Also fixes a potential issue with full-screen applications.

And we have even created a preliminary product page this time.

Buy Sofa Control

July 27th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

Apple ships a remote control with most of their computers. With only six buttons the Apple Remote is the ultimate in simple sophistication. The standard functionality, however, is limited to controlling just a couple of applications. Sofa Control breaks this limit. With Sofa Control you are able to control any application on your Mac and trigger whatever actions you like.

Now you might be wondering why we would recommend an application we’re not officially affiliated with. Here’s why: About a year ago, Sofa Control’s head developer, Martin Kahr, did something Apple forgot to do: He provided a framework named Remote Control Wrapper that made it ridiculously easy for 3rd-party applications to interface with the Apple Remote. So when we started thinking about adding remote control support to yFlicks, the decision to use Martin’s framework was more or less a no-brainer. It was rock-solid, it was elegant, and it was free.

However, we encountered one issue that — in our humble opinion — was worth fixing: There wasn’t any mechanism for managing situations where several applications using Martin’s framework would strive for access to the remote control. When we contacted Martin about this, we were delighted by his open-minded response and his willingness to work this out.

And that’s what we did. Together, we came up with a beautiful solution for this kind of race condition. And this solution doesn’t even require any additional work from 3rd-party developers. They just have to update their applications to the newest Remote Control Wrapper version.

Yesterday, Martin released said version, along with Sofa Control 2.1, which — hardly surprisingly — uses the Remote Control Wrapper framework, too. So now you can have yFlicks and Sofa Control work seamlessly together, because actually, that new Remote Control Wrapper version has been built into yFlicks since yFlicks 2.0.

Still Non-Transparent

June 19th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

Now that John Gruber has linked to Non-Transparent Menu Bar, this little proof of concept has become fairly popular. And believe it or not: We even received a bug report from the ever-vigilant Daniel Jalkut — or, to put in his words, a “minor tweak” that improves the z-level positioning of our transparency killer. (Note to self: Don’t just copy code from another project. Think about it first.)

So here’s a little update (source) to Non-Transparent Menu Bar, which also makes it more usable by turning it into a background application that doesn’t clutter your dock.

yFlicks was on macZOT (Tags)

June 19th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

First of all, we’d just like to say thank you! yFlicks was quite a success with the macZOT community. When we negotiated this offer, macZOT gave us an estimate of the number of licenses they thought we would be able to sell, based on their usual sales figures and consisting of a minimum and a maximum number.

We sold almost three times the maximum estimate.

And macZOT buyers are no different from our other customers, inasmuch as they ask for tag support a lot. You really seem to be waiting for this — waiting for a way to store a movie’s director and its genre, for instance, in your movie library. So we thought we might as well let you know that we’re working on tags right now. And there’s a reason why we are taking our time for this: We want to do it right; and we think we do. In fact, this could easily turn into the most intelligent tagging mechanism you have ever seen — most notably when combined with smart groups.

And who knows… There may be an even bigger picture to this.

yFlicks is on macZOT

June 14th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

If you have been pondering buying yFlicks, our movie viewer/manager, today might be the perfect day to do just that. We’re offering yFlicks at a special introductory price of just $11.95 on macZOT; so head on over there and get it.

As always with macZOT, this offer is only valid for one day.

Pretty obvious

June 13th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

Here’s a snippet from a message we sent to Panic on the very day Coda was released: “So let me be the first to congratulate on that User Interface Apple Design Award I’m sure Coda will win.”

Congratulations to all those other winners and runner-ups, too. Well deserved.

First! (Non-Transparent Menu Bar)

June 12th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

Here’s a little treat for fellow developers — if you’re like Michael Tsai or us, the first thing Leopard’s new desktop made you think about was this: How do I get rid of that ridiculous semi-transparent look of the menu bar?

Look no further, it’s a no-brainer (source).

To demonstrate what Non-Transparent Menu Bar does on Tiger systems as well, it covers the menu bar by default. Choose “Toggle Level” from the application menu to put it where it actually belongs. And if you’re actually thinking about using this, you’ll probably want to change its LSUIElement value to hide it from the dock.


Update: Non-Transparent Menu Bar 1.1 does that LSUIElement stuff for you.

yFlicks 2.0.1

June 12th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

yFlicks 2.0.1 adds support for downloading videos from DailyMotion and CollegeHumor. And now that Mac OS X 10.5 has been demoed in its final form, we thought we might as well throw in an optional Leopard-style main window behavior/texture that changes its hue depending on whether yFlicks is the frontmost application.

Also improves context menus and fixes two minor, yet pesky bugs that prompted us to release this update as soon as possible — see the changes log for more details.

yFlicks 2.0

June 8th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

yFlicks 2.0 is such a huge step forward, we were actually considering calling it yFlicks 3.0.

Seriously: There are more improvements than we can even remember right now, but the two most important things are full support for the Apple Remote — including access to all of your library just by hitting the “Menu” button — and the option to have yFlicks keep your library organized. The latter is quite similar to what iTunes does with your music: Name changes as well as your library’s folder structure are automatically reflected on the file system level when you enable this feature. If you’re interested in a more extensive list of changes, look here.

Oh, and by the way: yFlicks 2.0 is a free upgrade for registered users.

yFlicks 1.1

April 23rd, 2007 by Peter Maurer

yFlicks 1.1 adds smart groups, which let you filter all of your library’s contents by criteria such as name, rating, and date added. We’re also supporting downloads from two more video communities now, namely SevenLoad and ClipFish.


Update: There was a small typo in the original source code for yFlicks 1.1 that prevented you from deleting groups. Just download yFlicks 1.1 once more if you’re experiencing this problem.