Name Mangler 2.5.1 released

April 12th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Name Mangler 2.5.1 is out, available for direct customers via in-app updating (or by downloading the full version from our site), and for App Store customers via the Updates tab in the App Store application.

There’s only one change in this version, but it’s an important one. If a rename operation will remove the extension from one (or more) filenames, then Name Mangler will ask you to confirm that this is what you really want to do.

In older versions of Mac OS X (and the Mac OS in general), the loss of an extension wasn’t a big deal—the system didn’t rely on extensions to determine which program should open a given file. Now, however, extensions are quite important; remove the extension from a PNG file, for instance, and OS X will probably think that file is now a Unix Executable file. It’s important to note that the file itself hasn’t been damaged; if you put the extension back, it will work as it did before.

Given OS X’s relatively new reliance on extensions, we felt it important that Name Mangler ask you to reconfirm your intent to remove filename extensions before doing so.

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How to: Set up, grow, and move Usher movie libraries

March 27th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Usher is our powerful movie management tool; its mission in life is to bring order to the chaos that can be one’s collection of videos. To help you get the most out of Usher, this how-to covers setting up Usher’s main Library folder, adding more storage space, and moving movie files to a new hard drive (replacing an existing smaller drive).

Basic Library folder setup

Our recommended setup for Usher is to create your main Library folder on your machine’s boot disk, regardless of whether you intend to keep any movies there or not. By having the main Library folder on your boot drive, you’ll be able to see all your movies, even if they’re stored on a not-currently-connected external drive; you can even edit those movies’ metadata without them being physically present.

(If you’ve got a machine with more than one hard drive, and the extra drive (or drives) is always connected, feel free to place your Library folder on that drive. It’s only drives that are transient in nature that can be problematic as Library folder locations.)

If you simply install Usher and run it, this is the setup you will get—the main Library folder is created in your user’s Movies folder, within an Usher folder we create there. While you don’t have to use this arrangement, we strongly recommend that the main Library folder reside somewhere on your boot drive, or other always-there drive. (You can choose a new location for the Library folder on the Library tab of Usher’s preferences panel.)

After you’ve used Usher for a while, assuming you’re actively growing your movie collection, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself running short on drive space. Thankfully, Usher makes it really easy to add additional storage space to your collection.

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How to: Add dates/times to filenames with Name Mangler

March 14th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Name Mangler 3 includes date-based renaming features outside of Advanced mode; this article will be of interest only to those running Name Mangler 2.

Name Mangler is our user-friendly yet powerful batch file renamer. In this how-to, I’ll show you how to use Name Mangler’s Advanced mode to add date and/or timestamps to your filenames (and how to replace a portion of the filename, all in one pass).

While Advanced mode can be intimidating, the objective of this tutorial is to show you that it may not be as bad as you fear, and that you can do quite a lot with it. To get the most out of this tutorial, I recommend you create a batch of sample files, and follow along in Name Mangler, trying each step as you read.

Name Mangler’s Help file contains an entire section on Advanced mode, covering all the commands available; if you have the display space, opening the Help window alongside the tutorial and Name Mangler could be very useful.

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Name Mangler 2.5 and Witch 3.8 released

March 1st, 2012 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

Hot on the heels of Moom 2.4, we’ve just released Name Mangler 2.4 and Witch 3.8. These are both “full dot” version number increases; here’s a quick look at what’s new in each program:

Important note: Both Name Mangler and Witch now work only on Intel-based Macs and Mac OS X 10.6 or later. If you’re on a PowerPC-based system, and/or Mac OS X 10.5, you’ll want to remain on your current versions. If you accidentally update, you can download the prior versions from the sidebar on each program’s page.

Name Mangler 2.5

  • Added a File > Populate command (Command-O) to populate Name Mangler’s file list via the OS X Open dialog.
  • Advanced mode’s [pad] and truncate functions can now pad or truncate from the beginning of a string, by using negative numbers.
  • New name.extension and .extension variables ease some Advanced mode renaming tasks.
  • Full list of changes in Name Mangler 2.5.

Witch 3.8

  • The Witch switcher panel now scrolls to display all open windows, regardless of the length of the list. (Prior versions of Witch would extend the panel beyond the screen, but you couldn’t access items below the lower boundary of the screen.)
  • Witch’s debug mode now shows how long it takes for applications to provide their list of open windows. (More detail on this is in the release notes.)
  • Full list of changes in Witch 3.8.

App Store customers can find these new versions on the Updates tab of the App Store application (either now, or in the very near future). Direct customers can download new versions from our site, or use the in-app upates feature to update directly from the application.

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Moom 2.4 chains things together

February 28th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer

Great news for all you Moom users out there; Moom 2.4 is out, and features the single most-requested feature on our to do list: chaining of Custom Controls. This is mostly of interest to users with more than one display, but others may find it useful as well.

For this release, we’ve implemented chaining of Custom Controls in the most simple way possible: assign the same keyboard shortcut (either a single-key local shortcut, or a global multi-key shortcut) to more than one Moom Custom Control, and those Custom Controls will execute automatically, in the order you have them arranged in Moom’s Custom Controls panel. Here’s an example:

When I press Shift-Option-H, Moom will first move the frontmost window one display to the left, and then center that window. This all happens very rapidly, such that you’ll usually only see the end result of your chained Custom Controls (which is really all you care about, after all). You can read Moom’s Help file for more information on chaining Custom Controls.

Note that this isn’t our complete vision for chaining Moom Custom Controls; we have some great ideas on how to make it work much better in Moom 3. However, we think this implementation works, and it helps us get the feature out there for everyone to use, without waiting on the next major upgrade.

There’s more in Moom 2.4, of course; we’ve reorganized the menu bar menu, placing the often-used Save Window Layout Snapshot and Settings choices up top, and we now check to see if Moom is hidden at login in OS X Lion (as this causes issues with Moom’s green button overlay). You can read the release notes page to see all the changes in this release.

As always, updates for Mac App Store purchasers will be found (either now, or very shortly) on the Updates tab of the App Store application. Direct purchasers can download the latest version of Moom from our site, or use the in-app Updates tab to check for updates.

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How-to: Clean up filenames using Name Mangler

January 31st, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

Name Mangler can be used for many file renaming purposes; many people use it to change the generic IMG_ (or whatever) prefix their camera applies to all photos. Another good use, though, is to clean up filenames—either to remove odd characters (which can happen with web-downloaded files), or to remove characters not allowed in other filesystems, such as NTFS. In today’s how-to, I’ll show you how to do both of those things with some not-too-complicated Name Mangler queries.

Name Mangler 3 includes two entries in its Presets menu—Dumb Down for Windows and Trim Whitespace—that can fix many filename issues. This blog post explains some methods to use when those menu items aren’t enough.

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How-to: Save Many Tricks license files forever

January 16th, 2012 by Rob Griffiths

When you purchase our software directly from us (as opposed to in the App Store), you receive an email with a license file download link. Please download the file right away, as the download link expires in a few days. (If it didn’t expire, pirates could simply post the URL for anyone to use—forever.)

After downloading, double-click the downloaded file to license the associated app; you should see the license file window appear:

Both Peter and I prefer to these license files over serial numbers for many reasons (they seem more personal, they don’t require copy-and-paste and app switching, etc.), but there is one downside: Many users aren’t sure where to keep a copy of the file, to ease migrating to a new machine, or just for safekeeping. It turns out it’s actually very easy to back up these files…

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Moom 2.3.3 released

December 20th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths

Just in time for the holidays (as the developer side of the App Store is closed for a week, starting on the 22nd), Moom 2.3.3 has been released for both App Store and direct customers.

This update fixes a few minor issues (detailed in the release notes) including one often-reported problem: Moom couldn’t properly restore saved Chrome browser windows. Version 2.3.3 works fine with Chrome, at least based on our testing with a few users who reported the problem. (The prior behavior wasn’t due to a bug in Moom, but rather, the unconventional manner in which Chrome windows are created.)

App Store customers can get the update by looking at the Updates tab in the App Store application; direct customers can get it by selecting Check for Updates from the Moom menu.

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How-to: Make Firefox’s bookmarks play nicely with Butler

December 16th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths

One of Butler‘s features is a Bookmarks menu that displays bookmarks from a number of browsers, including classics such as Internet Explorer (thereby revealing the depths of Butler’s life experiences).

You can access these bookmarks from the Butler icon in your menu bar, or create a keyboard shortcut to pop it up as a menu near the mouse, put it in a droplet, etc. In short, it’s a quick way to get at your bookmarks without first going to your browser.

Over the years, however, most of these shortcuts have stopped working, as the various browsers changed the manner in which they store their bookmarks. As of today, in fact, only Safari and Camino still appear to work properly. (We’ll see what we can do about updating support for the other browsers in Butler 5, though we’ll probably not bother to look at Internet Explorer.)

Thanks to Butler user Rick, however, we can add one more browser back to that list: Firefox. He discovered a simple way to get Firefox’s bookmarks working again in Butler. (My workaround has been to use Xmarks to sync bookmarks across all my browsers, and then just use the Safari entry in Butler to see them.) Read on for Rick’s solution…

Here’s how to get your Firefox bookmarks back into Butler’s Bookmarks menu:

  1. In Firefox, type about:config in the URL bar, then press Return. You’ll see a warning about voiding the warranty; click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
  2. In the Filter box, type autoexport, and the list of matches will be reduced to just one: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML.
  3. Double-click anywhere on the browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML line, and you should see its Value entry change to true.
  4. Quit and restart Firefox.

That’s it; in a few minutes, you should find that the Firefox entry in Butler’s Bookmarks item is now populated with your Firefox bookmarks. Thanks again to Rick for pointing out this workaround.

Posted in Butler, How To, Products, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

How To: Use Lion, the Witch, and the Escape key

December 15th, 2011 by Rob Griffiths

Early in 2011, as we were testing our apps with the Lion developer previews, Peter and I noticed something odd with Witch in Lion: some, but not all, of our Macs were unable to dismiss the Witch switcher panel via the Escape key. Peter dug into Witch’s code, and could find no reason for this, so then we started looking at the operating system itself. What we found is that the problem is indeed in Lion, and it’s related to Front Row (which, ironically enough, isn’t in Lion).

In a nutshell, Lion is reserving the Command-Escape keystroke to activate Front Row, even though there’s no Front Row to activate. So if you use Command-Tab to activate Witch, and then press Escape to cancel the window, Lion sees a Command-Escape keypress, and captures it—Witch never sees it, and its switcher panel isn’t dismissed. (If you disabled Front Row in 10.6, or remapped its activation keys, and then upgraded to Lion, you’re probably not having this problem. But if you did use Command-Escape for Front Row, you’ll want to use this fix.) We filed an Apple bug report on this back in March of 2011, but it’s still open and unresolved.

To fix this problem, we’ve created a simple little application, Escape Key Liberator. Usage couldn’t be much easier: download and mount the disk image, then launch the program (right from the disk image; it’s fine). You’ll be greeted by this incredibly obvious dialog:

Click the Liberate button, then quit Escape Key Liberator. Now comes the only slightly annoying portion of the process: you must logout and login for the change to take effect.

But after that task is done, you should once again be able to use the Escape key to dismiss the Witch switcher panel. You can then delete (or zip and archive, for possible future use on another Mac) the Escape Key Liberator disk image; it’s a one-trick pony, and its trick is done.

(Note: If you’re the kind of person who prefers replacing the transmission in your car yourself, instead of taking the car to the shop, read on for instructions on freeing your Escape key without the ease of a couple of mouse clicks.)

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