Many Tricks
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.
Key Codes 1.0.2
February 18th, 2008 by Peter MaurerName Mangler 2.0
February 14th, 2008 by Peter MaurerWhy 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 It also had an outdated user interface, it didn’t run natively on Intel processors, and it had an icon that was actually a scaled screenshot.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.
Desktop Curtain 1.0.1
February 12th, 2008 by Peter MaurerIt’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.
User Interface 101: Snap
February 10th, 2008 by Peter MaurerA 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?
yFlicks 3.2(.1)
February 7th, 2008 by Peter MaurerIf 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.
Service Scrubber 1.1.4; yFlicks 3.1.1
January 16th, 2008 by Peter MaurerWe’ve got two bug-fix updates for you today:
Firstly, Service Scrubber 1.1.4 no longer lets you edit signed applications, as introduced by Mac OS X 10.5. This restriction effectively limits Service Scrubber to non-Apple applications and services; but unfortunately, it’s a necessary step — at least as of now.
Here’s why: Service Scrubber works by editing an application’s resources, and those signed applications refuse to play nice with your key chain, which is used for storing your passwords, once their resources have been edited by a 3rd-party application, such as Service Scrubber. So if you’re using Service Scrubber on services made available by Apple’s Mail application, for instance, Mail might lose the ability to access your stored mailbox passwords or store new passwords.
If you’re still on Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier, this restriction does not apply, as there aren’t any signed applications there. And if you’re willing to take the risk of editing certain signed applications on Mac OS X 10.5, let us know. There is a way to circumvent the “non-signed applications only” restriction built into Service Scrubber 1.1.4, but we’re not sure yet whether releasing it is worth the risk of having some users detach their applications from the key chain, so to speak, without being fully aware of the consequences.
The second update is much easier to explain: yFlicks 3.1.1 fixes an issue that made downloading from international YouTube sites — such as de.youtube.com — impossible. End of story.
A Forum Called Help
January 11th, 2008 by Peter MaurerYou have been asking for this for years; and here it is: the Many Tricks Forum.
Now, you might realize that this forum lives at a subdomain, namely help.manytricks.com. Why did we call it that? We don’t necessarily think of this forum as another means to help users solve problems they might encounter with our software. We do that by e-mail most of the time, and it works fine.
We’re talking about the inverse here: We’d like to ask you to help us improve our products by sharing your ideas and disussing them with your fellow users.
This will make it easier for us to evaluate what features are really needed; and sometimes, you might even realize that your request has already been complied with. For example, you wouldn’t believe how often we hear something along the lines of “I didn’t know Butler could do that”.
So by opening this forum, we’re asking you a favor. We’re asking you to participate and share your insight. In return, we are going to give away one software license for free to an active forum member each month.
Update: The forum is not available at this time. Feel free to yell at us in public via Twitter and/or blog comments in the meantime. ;-)
yFlicks 3.1
January 11th, 2008 by Peter MaurerThere are a lot of improvements in yFlicks 3.1, and you can read all about them here; but let’s focus on two things we’re especially thrilled with for the sake of brevity:
Firstly, you can now have yFlicks treat a sequence of movies as one composite movie by selecting them and choosing “Merge Movie Sequence…” from the “File” menu. This makes dealing with multi-part movies, as present in vast quantities on YouTube, for instance, much easier and more elegant.
And seconly, sometimes you encounter a movie that has black borders around the actual movie frames. Apart from consuming screen estate, these don’t serve any purpose, so yFlicks now lets you get rid of them by choosing “Crop Visible Area…” from the “Display” menu.
Butler 4.1.5 Transient
December 31st, 2007 by Peter MaurerThis version defers the transient Butler‘s expiration date until July 1, 2008 — please read this blog entry if you’re wondering why Butler is currently in a transient state.
Simply put, we need some more time to get a public beta version of Butler 5 out of the door; and we don’t want to force you to check for a new transient version every other week until then. That’s why we have chosen a rather distant expiry date.
Oh, and by the way: Have a happy new year’s eve!
yFlicks 3.0.3
December 13th, 2007 by Peter MaureryFlicks 3.0.3 squashes just one little bug, namely a display glitch in the English localization’s “Advanced” preferences tab.