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.
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”.
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.
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.
There are quite a number of improvements in yFlicks 3.3: First of all, our eye candy department wants you to know that you can now browse your movies in coverflow mode (Mac OS X 10.5 only, sorry). And if you’re using yFlicks’s Usher mode to have Front Row display your movies in a hierarchical fashion, you will be pleased to hear that yFlicks can now include your iTunes movies in its library. Apple doesn’t want us to play back movies you’ve bought from the iTunes store, but you will be able to organize those movies in your smart groups nevertheless.
In other news, we’ve added something we had been promising since yFlicks 1.0: more conversion/export options. You’re no longer restricted to exporting to MPEG-4, and converting a movie no longer blocks yFlicks. We’ve also improved the web video downloading mechanism quite significantly. Downloading those movies is now much less likely to fail, as we’ve added something we like to call the generic web media detector. Said detector not only makes yFlicks work with a lot more video sites than before, it also supports things like downloading MP3 files from MySpace, for instance. And once you’ve downloaded a web video, you can now have yFlicks convert that video to something your iPhone/iPod can work with automatically.
In fact, we’ve come to the conclusion that yFlicks’s downloading and conversion functionality might also appeal to users who don’t want to organize those web videos in yFlicks — e.g., because they’re doing it in iTunes. So we created a spin-off, which focuses on just that: downloading and converting movies. Say hello to TubiTunes, the easiest-to-use web video downloader and movie converter ever.
And if you think that TubiTunes is close to being a light-weight download manager, you’re perfectly right. It would be ridiculously easy to develop TubiTunes into a download manager, and if we ever did this, even the application icon would be quite similar to TubiTunes’s icon. We’ll see.
We know most users weren’t exactly dying to get this update, but we’ve been asked for it, so here you go: Key Codes 1.0.2 is still a very, very basic key code explorer application that comes in handy when developing Mac OS X applications. The news is: It’s a universal binary now.
Why is there a version 2.0 of an application you’ve never even heard of before? Here’s why: This is the successor of the batch rename utility with the lamest name ever — File List. And File List didn’t just have a name that wasn’t much help in figuring out what the application actually did. It also had an outdated user interface, it didn’t run natively on Intel processors, and it had an icon that was actually a scaled screenshot.
So we fixed all these issues, and now that we’re done, we think we just created the best file renamer ever. Meet Name Mangler.
It’s about time we made our little screenshot helper/tidiness impersonator a universal binary that runs natively on Intel processors. Moreover, Desktop Curtain 1.0.1 has been adapted to Mac OS X 10.5’s new default desktop picture.
A lot of applications have little overlay windows that control the application’s behavior when in fullscreen mode. Take, for instance, QuickTime Player’s fullscreen playback controls or the Finder’s slideshow controls. By default, they pop up at the lower center of your screen, but you can move them with your mouse.
The odd thing is: Once you’ve moved them (e.g., by accident), there’s virtually no way to re-center them. And you can move them off screen, at least partially. Sure, there are a lot of reasons that justify moving a standard window partially off screen, and I won’t even discuss them here, because I’m lazy. But I don’t think these reasons apply to little overlay windows with just a few controls — windows that are typically the only visible window of their kind, displayed in front of some kind of fullscreen content.
I may be more obsessive than most users in this respect, but if I want to center a window, I want it centered, not just approximately centered. So to me, it has always been obvious that said overlay windows should snap to the screen’s center (or at least the center of the screen’s abscissa) when moved near there. And it’s equally obvious that they should snap to the screen’s edges. If you do it that way, there’s an additonal benefit: Most of these overlay windows have rounded corners; and if you snap them to the screen edges (or corners, for that matter), you can adjust the window’s corners according to the window’s position, because a rounded lower right window corner doesn’t make much sense if it’s snug against the screen’s lower right corner.
That’s how yFlicks behaves. And Butler‘s little status window — the one you see when pressing a hot key, for instance — has been snapping to certain screen positions for years as well. But the thought that I may be overlooking the elephant in the room keeps haunting me, because I can’t find the answer to one simple question:
Why doesn’t Apple do it?
If you’re like us, you have some of your movies on your computer’s boot drive, while others are located on an external mass storage device. Up to now, that was a problem, because there wasn’t an elegant way to organize all those movies in one library while keeping the benefits of having yFlicks organize your movie files automatically.
yFlicks 3.2 introduces supplementary library folders that help you distribute your movies across several volumes while still having them organized automatically. And it hides those movies that are currently not available as soon as you unmount your external volumes. Re-mount them, and yFlicks shows all those movies again.
Apart from the usual maintenance stuff (fixed downloading from YouTube and others), there are a lot more improvements in this version, and most of them can be classified as user interface enhancements. Have a look at this list for the details.
Update: The original yFlicks 3.2 had an issue with Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, which we’ve just fixed. So if you were experiencing a problem with starting yFlicks under Tiger, please download again and accept our sincere apologies for having overlooked this one.
Many Tricks