Service Scrubber 1.1.4; yFlicks 3.1.1

January 16th, 2008 by Peter Maurer

We’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 Maurer

You 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 Maurer

There 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 Maurer

This 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 Maurer

yFlicks 3.0.3 squashes just one little bug, namely a display glitch in the English localization’s “Advanced” preferences tab.

yFlicks 3.0.2

December 10th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

This 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 Maurer

We’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 Maurer

Our 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 Maurer

The 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.

Being Stubborn (Menu Bar Tint)

November 15th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

Yesterday, Steve Miner published a method to make the menu bar in Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” opaque, non-translucent or non-transparent — whatever you prefer to call it.

While a lot of Leopard users will probably not even see the point in this, we are very happy to finally have a solution for one of our pet peeves with the Leopard. As some of you may know, we had even created our own little application for achieving the same thing a few months ago, but the method it employed didn’t work in the final, official Leopard.

Turns out you just have to set a certain environment variable to get rid of the translucent menu bar. However, there’s one thing about this we didn’t like: Once you’ve done so, the menu bar is very white, and it looks very plain.

So we revived that aforementioned application of ours, tweaked it a little, changed it’s name, and here we are: Menu Bar Tint draws a grayscale color gradient over your menu bar, making your newly opaque menu bar feel more at home among all the other user interface elements in Mac OS X. And if you feel like going wild with colors, you’re free to do so, too.