Butler 4.1.3 Transient

November 7th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

This version of Butler fixes all issues with Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” we are currently aware of. Most importantly, fast user switching and related functionality are working once again — a user management change in Leopard had caused most of the Leopard issues users have been experiencing, although it hasn’t always been obvious.

Moreover, selecting menu items that are also submenu parents is back to working as expected (where applicable, e.g., menu items that represent a file system folder); and we’ve fixed several interface glitches.

So why do we call this a transient release? Why does it expire on January 1, 2008? Actually, we are working on Butler 5, which will run on Mac OS X 10.5 only and employ some of the exciting new features in Mac OS X that we haven’t been able to use up to now, since we’ve always supported Mac OS X versions as early as 10.2.8 with Butler.

And once this new version is released, we’d prefer a clear cut between Butler 4.1.2 (Mac OS X 10.2.8 through 10.4.x) and Butler 5 (Mac OS X 10.5 and newer). We’ll have to say more about this soon.

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Beware of Sharp Corners

October 26th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

As explained here, the very first Leopard hack, namely Non-Transparent Menu Bar, was forcefully retired somewhat prematurely. So we recycled its source code and turned it into another nostalgia hack.

See, the new Mac OS X doesn’t draw rounded screen corners anymore. Most users won’t notice, others will be happy about this change, but some might miss that cuddly CRT aura those rounded corners emitted.

So if you’d rather still have rounded corners, have a look at Displaperture, the little tool that lets you retain your beloved rounded screen corners. You can even determine those corners’ radii, and you can pick the corners you want rounded — including the bottom ones.

Posted in Desktop Curtain, Menu Bar Tint | Comments Off on Beware of Sharp Corners

Meow, says the Leopard

October 26th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

Now that the new cat is out of the bag, it’s time to have a look at how our applications cope with it. Here’s a preliminary overview:

Butler
• has issues with its built-in Fast User Switching replacement
• doesn’t draw its configuration subheaders correctly
Both issues will be addressed during the next few days.

Desktop Curtain
• doesn’t cover the part of the wallpaper that “shines through” the menu bar
Not sure how to fix this, cf. Non-Transparent Menu Bar.

Non-Transparent Menu Bar
• simply put: doesn’t work
We did actually have reason to believe that this would work during earlier beta stages of Mac OS X 10.5. However, the final Leopard’s menu bar is opaque, and instead of letting the background shine through, it draws a blurred copy of your wallpaper. We hate to waste source code, though, so we thought of something else we could do with this — see our next blog entry.

File List, Key Codes, Service Scrubber, Witch, yFlicks
• all of these seem to work fine
However, if you happen to encounter any Leopard-related bug that we didn’t find, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Thanks!

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Apparel 1.0

August 8th, 2007 by Peter Maurer

Admit it: You’re dying to get a Butler shirt. Well, at least we were; and that’s why we decided to configure and order a couple of these at CafePress. Once we had done so, we thought to ourselves: The Butler icon does have its fans, so why not let them wear their favorite utility’s icon, too?

Thus, we proudly present Many Tricks Apparel, our own little apparel/mugs/whatnot store.

Oh, and those product prizes? They are CafePress’s base prizes — we don’t earn jack from anything sold through CafePress. But we would feel incredibly honored if you actually considered wearing our special little guy.

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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.

Posted in Menu Bar Tint | Comments Off on A.K.A. Non-Translucent

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.

Posted in General, yFlicks | Comments Off on Buy Sofa Control

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.

Posted in Menu Bar Tint | Comments Off on Still Non-Transparent

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.

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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.

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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.

Posted in General | Comments Off on Pretty obvious

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