OmniGrowl & Cast Away Updates and Big Things to Come

WBC today released updates to two of our popular applications: OmniGrowl and Cast Away. These are the first of our applications to be code signed with Gatekeeper for OS X Mountain Lion support. All of our other applications will also be updated and signed for Gatekeeper in the coming weeks.

OmniGrowl 4.4.4 includes a number of fixes for existing data sources including Woot, Pollstar, discogs, and Oxford English Dictionary. It also includes a number of other bug fixes and many initial changes to support Mountain Lion.

Cast Away 2.9.8 fixes a Lion issue related to resuming application states after a restart. It now auto-launches iTunes and waits for it to become available rather than present a dialog asking you to start iTunes first. It also includes a work-around for a plugin issue, for our advanced users.

This is the beginning of a wave of big updates that WBC has planned for Mountain Lion. Rather than make each of our applications fully "at home" with Mountain Lion one by one, we have decided to focus first on Gatekeeper and basic compatibility in a first round of updates, and then fine tune them in a second update round. Since it has long been difficult to continue supporting Tiger and Leopard and PPC Macs, this first update round will be the last to do so for many of our applications. In the planned second round, we will unfortunately need to require OS X Snow Leopard and thus Intel macs for some of our products. When possible, we will continue to build for those older systems, but can no longer offer support for them. Please see this FAQ entry for further details about legacy support.

Some of our customers have asked whether we plan to offer our applications in the Mac App Store. Since most of our products focus on integration with other applications, and since Apple has introduced new "sandboxing" requirements that severely limits or makes impossible such functionality, we have decided to continue to distribute our products directly to our customers. We appreciate those who help spread the word about useful software that is not available in the Mac App Store.

Despite the major effort (and new expenses) required to update many our products for Mountain Lion, we have decided not to charge any upgrade fees. However, we gratefully accept additional donations from our loyal customers! Please use the donate button on the right if you wish to do so. Those who have paid in the past and also donate now will receive special consideration in the event that we decide to charge upgrade fees in the coming months.