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Witch 3.6.1 slides onto the scene

This latest Witch update—for both the Mac App Store and web site versions of Witch—includes two requested features and a number of minor bug fixes. (Note for App Store users: it may be anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours until you see the update in the App Store.) The two new features are:

  • Witch can now “see” many more windows without titles than it previously could. In particular, if you save Mail drafts without Subject lines, Witch should now show those as (Untitled) windows.

    Of course, because they have no title, you’ll want to use the pop-up preview feature to see what’s actually in those untitled windows. Witch should also display untitled windows in Elgato’s applications, and Sparrow, the minimalist Gmail client.

  • There’s a new slider in the Behavior tab of Witch’s settings that controls how long Witch will wait to hear from an application before giving up on it.

    Witch works by polling all applications, asking for information about their windows. If an application is slow to respond, we’re forced to make a choice: wait to display the switcher panel, or display the switcher panel in a reasonable amount of time, but leave out the slow-responding application (because we can’t determine its window states).

    Witch is set to wait 0.2 seconds, which is typically more than enough time. Certain troublesome apps, though, may work better with a longer timeout. You can use this new slider—which will let you set a timeout of up to two seconds—to find a balancing point that you’re happy with. Note: Unless you’re having trouble with missing windows, we suggest leaving this slider where it is.

  • If you use Matrox products to use extra displays on your laptop Mac, Witch now has some hidden settings that greatly improve the appearance of the switcher panel on those machines. If you’re one of those users, write to me and I’ll provide the usage instructions.

Mac App Store users can update via the App Store application; users of the web site version of Witch should be notified of the available update. (Check the Update tab in settings to make sure you’re set up for automatic notification of new updates.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2011 at 6:04 am by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer, and is filed under Mac App Store, Products, Witch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Witch 3.6.1 slides onto the scene”

  1. Richard says:
    February 18, 2011 at 11:24 pm

    Hi guys, your new approach to windows without titles has finally made JustNotes visible to Witch. Not bad at all! If now Witch would additionally assign some provisional title, maybe derived from the process name, perfect!

    Not sure if this is related to the new approach but since the last update Path Finder windows always show up twice! One entry uses the app’s icon, the other one the currently opened folder’s icon. Since both entries have the same title, you can’t work around this via exception rules. Can you folks replicate this behaviour?

    Thanks!

  2. Rob Griffiths says:
    February 19, 2011 at 6:35 am

    I’m not sure how we’d assign a window title in a way that would work generically across all apps – and we’d rather not add app-specific code if we can at all avoid it. That’s why we went with what we did.

    The Path Finder issue is related to the fix for untitled windows — and it’s something I normally would have caught during testing, but I wasn’t running Path Finder due to a video production project I was working on. A user reported it, though, and we’ve already got a fix in a beta version that we’ll get out after a bit more testing (on some other minor changes we made).

    If you’d like to test that version, drop me an email (there’s a link to my email on our About page).

    -rob.