OmniGrowl resigned again

It was brought to our attention that the last version of OmniGrowl was improperly signed for Gatekeeper. This resulted in OS X throwing up a "damaged" error when trying to open it on some systems. It has now been properly signed, we very much believe. We're calling this version 4.5.5y3.

In other news, the royal we will be traveling from December 5 through January 7, so please forgive any delays in support responses during this time.

Re-signed, not resigned, and more

At today's Apple event, we expect OS X Yosemite to be released to the public.

Last August, Apple made it clear that all applications would need to be re-signed for GateKeeper compatibility under Mavericks and Yosemite. While it turns out these new requirements may not be enforced as strictly as originally warned, we have complied by re-signing the last versions of the following apps. CaliBrate, Cast Away, iDupe, MoveTunes, OmniGrowl, Osiris, and ThinkArch.

Each of these apps has been tested to open and function as designed with the last developer preview of Yosemite. Several of these apps will require some further changes to "fit" with Yosemite, but these are mostly cosmetic. We anticipate completing those updates in short order.

For now, if the last version of an app you use (and hopefully bought, thank you very much) is working normally under Yosemite, there's really no need to update to this re-signed version.

In other news, we are disappointed that 4info has shuttered its service last May. Therefore the stock quotes, sports scores, and horoscopes previously supported by OmniGrowl using data from their service will no longer function. We have been searching for alternatives (ideas welcome). In the meantime, you can save some CPU cycles by simply setting the cycle slider to 2 hours and/or removing your search terms.

Also, if there is anyone out there who used ThinkArch with MS Entourage and wished for a version compatible with MS Outlook, please drop us a line. Producing that update has continually fallen to the end of the priority list, but if there is any interest at all there may finally be some time to do it.

Cast Away Update Works Around iTunes 11 Bugs

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to Cast Away, a podcast manager for iTunes.

Cast Away allows you to remove podcasts according to criteria that are much more fine-grained than possible in iTunes. Cast Away can prevent podcasts from expiring in iTunes, update smart playlists, and archive selected podcasts. It also includes an auto-player that can play selected podcasts as they arrive and then return to the previously playing music, if any.

The update fixes more issues related to iTunes 11.x. iTunes 11.1 introduced bugs that have been partially fixed by Apple with iTunes 11.1.4.

For those curious, we're actually dealing with a rather odd situation. Cast Away uses Apple Events to ask iTunes for a list of podcast episodes for each subscribed podcast. Before iTunes 11, we could tell which episodes had been downloaded and which have not by whether they were "file tracks" or "URL tracks". With ITunes 11, the list of URL tracks grew very large. It turns out that iTunes was including "cloud" URL tracks that had already been deleted by the user. This has been partially fixed by Apple but not completely. As a result, Cast Away was trying to process a lot of "phantom" tracks, which was causing errors and significant delays.

With this version, Cast Away still has to handle lists of tracks that include these phantoms. The difference now is Cast Away recognizes them and ignores them right away without excessive processing, thus eliminating the errors seen by the user and speeding up the checking.

Unfortunately, due to that and related bugs, the feature to remove undownloaded ("cloud") podcasts remains disabled in this version.

Please see the version history for details.

OmniGrowl Update: Weather, iTunes Radio

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to OmniGrowl which adds a requested feature related to Yahoo Weather notifications and tweaks support for iTunes Radio.

One of our loyal customers told us that he didn't need to see the extended weather forecast in weather notifications. So we added an option to include forecast on the Info tab (where the weather section is). By default OmniGrowl will show the forecast as before, but you can now turn it off if you wish, in which case only the current conditions and temperature will be shown.

This update also tweaks support for iTunes Radio notifications.

As usual, please refer to the version history for details.

iDupe & MoveTunes Updates Support Mavericks, Fix Bugs

WBC today released compatibility and bug fix updates for two more of our applications: iDupe and MoveTunes.

iDupe is an intelligent duplicates remover for iTunes. MoveTunes allows selective moving of iTunes music among volumes while retaining metadata such as ratings, artwork, and playlists.

The updates fix minor issues with OS X 10.9 Mavericks, thus certifying them for use on Apple's latest, and first non-cat, OS. Our Mavericks compatibility chart has been updated accordingly. All of our major products are now fully compatible.

In addition, these updates fix a few known bugs introduced with iTunes 11. The most significant of these involves preserving artwork when removing duplicates in iTunes (using iDupe) or adding moved tracks back to iTunes (using MoveTunes). For details on the bug fixes and other changes, please see the iDupe version history and the MoveTunes version history.

Finally, please note that we will be on holiday from November 24 through December 4, 2013. Please understand if any support inquiries are delayed during this period.

CaliBrate Supports Mavericks

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to CaliBrate which makes it compatible with OS X Mavericks.

CaliBrate allows you to search for and batch process multiple events in Calendar or iCal. With it, you can remove duplicate events, shift them in time, change titles or notes all at once, move them between calendars, and much more.

Mavericks introduced one major known problem that caused Calendar to hang when CaliBrate attempted to copy or move events between calendars.

The problem is caused by a new bug in Mavericks, which makes it impossible to set exceptions to a recurrence rule on a new event without causing Calendar to hang. Unfortunately at this time there is no known work around for this bug, which we have reported to Apple.

Consequently, until Apple fixes this bug, CaliBrate (when used on OS X 10.9+) will make no attempt to set exceptions to recurrence rules when creating new events. This means, for example, that if you have an event that repeats every Monday except certain, specific dates, when CaliBrate copies that event to another calendar, the copy will repeat every Monday without exceptions.

CaliBrate now also explains this situation in the info box before performing a copy or move action.

Please see the version history for details. Please also see the limitations section under CaliBrate's about tab.

OmniGrowl Update Actually Fixes Trial Limitation

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to OmniGrowl which really, truly, fixes the trial expiry at launch bug.

Unregistered users were seeing a trial expired message immediately after launching OmniGrowl. The intent is for OmniGrowl to be fully functional for 6 hours of use per launch, regardless of whether it is registered or not.

Last week we released a Mavericks compatibility update that we thought had also fixed that bug. It turns out that OmniGrowl was still evaluating trial expiration relative to the application build time, not the launch time. It was a silly error on our part. This should now truly be fixed and we apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact us if this still occurs on your system.

As usual, please refer to the version history for details.

OmniGrowl Update Supports Mavericks, Fixes Trial Limitation

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to OmniGrowl which supports OS X Mavericks, and fixes a couple of important bugs.

OmniGrowl provides over a dozen kinds of useful notifications, including calendar events, reminders, weather, traffic, flights, and news.

The most important bug fixed is that in many cases, unregistered users were seeing a trial expired message immediately after launching OmniGrowl. The intent is for OmniGrowl to be fully functional for 6 hours of use per launch, regardless of whether it is registered or not. We believe this has now been fixed. Please contact us if this occurs on your system.

OmniGrowl will now display notifications when playing iTunes Radio with iTunes 11, even when "full notifications" is selected. Previously OmniGrowl only showed iTunes Radio notifications if "basic notifications" was selected.

Please note that the "Events" tab remains intentionally blank, while we continue to search for a suitable reliable data source to replace Yahoo Upcoming.

As usual, please refer to the version history for details.

Cast Away Update Addresses Compatibility

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to Cast Away, a podcast manager for iTunes.

Cast Away allows you to remove podcasts according to criteria that are much more fine-grained than possible in iTunes. Cast Away can prevent podcasts from expiring in iTunes, update smart playlists, and archive selected podcasts. It also includes an auto-player that can play selected podcasts as they arrive and then return to the previously playing music, if any.

The update fixes more issues related to iTunes 11.x. iTunes 11.0 and 11.1 introduced bugs that have been partially fixed by Apple with iTunes 11.1.1. Therefore Cast Away now requires 11.1.1 or higher or many versions of iTunes below iTunes 11.0.

Unfortunately there are still bugs in iTunes relating to removing undownloaded ("cloud") podcasts so this feature remains disabled in this version.

This release is believed to fix an issue related to the creation of the disc image with the previous version, which prevented the application from opening on certain systems.

Lastly, provisional compatibility testing on Mavericks is complete. Final certification will follow.

Please see the version history for details.

Cast Away Update Fixes Issues with iTunes 11

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to Cast Away, a podcast manager for iTunes.

Cast Away allows you to remove podcasts according to criteria that are much more fine-grained than possible in iTunes. Cast Away can prevent podcasts from expiring in iTunes, update smart playlists, and archive selected podcasts. It also includes an auto-player that can play selected podcasts as they arrive and then return to the previously playing music, if any.

The update fixes a variety of issues related to iTunes 11.

Please see the version history for details.

iTunes 11.1 Issues for Cast Away and OmniGrowl Users

Likely incompatibilities with iTunes 11.1 and two of our products have come to our attention. Here are the known issues to date:

After installing iTunes 11.1, you are presented with an new "welcome" screen in iTunes specifically for Podcasts. If you do not open that before Cast Away next runs, Cast Away may report inaccurate removals and other errors. (Podcasts are not erroneously removed; merely the reporting is inaccurate.)

Cast Away is failing to remove undownloaded podcasts from the list when specified. It may be impossible to delete these "cloud" episodes from the list with iTunes 11.1, which might explain why.

OmniGrowl does not recognize iTunes Radio for notifications. We're looking into whether a fix for that is possible on our end, or whether Apple would need to make changes to iTunes to allow such notifications.

Other minor issues may exist with other products related to iTunes. We are looking into them and will issue compatibility upgrades as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Cast Away Update Improves Scheduling

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to Cast Away, a podcast manager for iTunes.

Cast Away allows you to remove podcasts according to criteria that are much more fine-grained than possible in iTunes. Cast Away can prevent podcasts from expiring in iTunes, update smart playlists, and archive selected podcasts. It also includes an auto-player that can play selected podcasts as they arrive and then return to the previously playing music, if any.

The update improves handling of the daily schedule, which should now work more reliably on OS X 10.8 and higher.

For the technically inclined, Cast Away had been using cron to schedule podcast removal, and now uses launchd on OS X 10.7 and higher.

A bug relating to iTunes U was also fixed.

Please see the version history for details.

OmniGrowl Update Fixes AMG & OED, Removes Support for Yahoo Upcoming

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to OmniGrowl which fixes issues with AMG artist biography notifications and Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Word of the Day Notifications. It also fixes an issue with authenticated RSS feeds.

OmniGrowl provides over a dozen kinds of useful notifications, including calendar events, reminders, weather, traffic, flights, and news.

Unfortunately, with this release, we have had to remove support for local events provided by Yahoo. Prior to this month, OmniGrowl could notify you of public events in your area. It drew its data from Yahoo Upcoming, which Yahoo shut down in May 2013.

Thus far, we have unfortunately been able to find a suitable data source for local events with anything close to global coverage. After an initial assessment, we have found the data of eventful to be too sparse outside of concerts which OmniGrowl covers with other data sources, and the business model of zvents not amenable. (We are open to reconsideration of either given better information.) If and when one emerges, we will make every effort to restore support for local event notifications. Suggestions are welcome.

As usual, please refer to the version history for details.

CaliBrate Updated and OmniGrowl and DevonSync News

Calibrate Updated

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to CaliBrate which improves support for adding attendees and fixes a bug affecting OS X 10.7+ that caused events copied between calendars to move them instead. Events are now copied rather than moved. Please see the version history for details.

CaliBrate allows you to search for and batch process multiple events in Calendar or iCal. With it, you can remove duplicate events, shift them in time, change titles or notes all at once, move them between calendars, and much more.

OmniGrowl, Yahoo Upcoming, and Local Events

We'd like to take this opportunity to address the situation with local events support in OmniGrowl. OmniGrowl provided local events notifications using Yahoo Upcoming, which is now defunct. The current version of OmniGrowl will work as normal, but the local events will no longer work.

While Yahoo announced it would sunset Upcoming long ago, it gave only two weeks notice before the eventual shut down date. WBC has been evaluating potential replacements, but so far has not found anything satisfactory. We welcome comments and suggestions in this forum thread. If no satisfactory replacement is found in short order, we will unfortunately need to simply remove this feature in a coming update.

DevonSync No Longer Supported or Sold

This announcement is overdue. DevonSync was always intended to be somewhat of a stopgap measure until DEVONthink supported synching natively. After a long beta period, DEVONtechnologies debuted native sync support for DEVONthink, a development which we warmly welcome. As of May 1, 2013, DevonSync will no longer be supported or sold. We'd like to thank our customers for your prior support.

iTunes 11 and WBC Software

Yesterday Apple released iTunes 11, which brings an entirely new look to iTunes.

The changes are dramatic, but under the hood iTunes remains largely the same. This means that Wooden Brain Concepts software that interacts with iTunes – iDupe, MoveTunes, Cast Away, and OmniGrowl – are expected to work as they have with previous version of iTunes. As WBC had no advance access to iTunes 11, full functionality is now under testing. Updates will be made as necessary over the coming weeks.

For the time being, some words regarding iDupe specifically are in order. Since iDupe relies on using list checkboxes to deselect duplicate tracks, you must do two things. First, in the General tab of iTunes' Preferences, you must enable the option to "show list checkboxes." This was the case with iTunes 10 as well. Second, you must use a view that includes these list checkboxes. With iTunes 11, there is more than one way to do this.

If you want a view of your whole library, make sure that "Music" is selected in the upper left corner. Then on the top bar, select "Songs" and sort in a way that makes sense to you. Usually this would be by Artist or Album or Album by Artist. Just click the top header of the column to adjust the sort.

Alternately, you can select "Playlists" on the top bar. This is really the preferred way to use iDupe. Select your playlist on the left. Then in the top right corner, use the "View" button to select "List" and then set your sort as above.

In both cases, if your preferred sort column does not appear, go to the "View" menu item in the top menu bar and select "View Options…" There you'll be able to select the view(s) you need.

In either of these views, you can select the tracks for iDupe to scan as desired.

More info will follow as necessary.

OmniGrowl Updated for Growl 2, CaliBrate Also Updated

WBC today released updates to two of our applications: OmniGrowl and CaliBrate.

OmniGrowl provides over a dozen kinds of useful notifications, including calendar events, reminders, local events, weather, traffic, flights, and news.

CaliBrate allows you to search for and batch process multiple events in Calendar or iCal. With it, you can remove duplicate events, shift them in time, change titles or notes all at once, move them between calendars, and much more.

Today's OmniGrowl 4.5 update includes several significant changes and improvements. Most importantly, it has been updated for compatibility with Growl 2.0, which integrates with Notification Center on Mountain Lion. Therefore, it is now possible to send OmniGrowl notifications to Notification Center via Growl!

Please note that at this time there are known quirks which are related to Growl's implementation of Apple's sandboxing requirements and are most likely beyond our control. First, clickable notifications are no longer clickable after a short length of time. Second, notifications sent to Notification Center frequently display a generic icon or image. WBC expects to work with the Growl team to address these issues in the near future. We believe an early compatibility release with these known issues is preferable to waiting.

In order to support Growl 2.0, it was also necessary to drop support for any OS X version before 10.6 and PPC Macs. The last OmniGrowl version compatible with OS X 10.4, 10.5, and PPC is version 4.4.5.

OmniGrowl 4.5 includes many other fixes and improvements. MacZot and Woot notifications have been fixed. All RSS feed preset links have been validated. Outdated feed presets have been removed and others have been added. The Facebook notification preset auto-fill feature has been updated to support new authentication requirements. If you use the Facebook feed, please delete and re-add it using the preset. For those of you who used the Netflix notification, unfortunately Netflix has decided to discontinue their shipping feed. Please contact Netflix to complain if you relied on that, as did we!

Today's update to CaliBrate adds a feature request to the Shift Events in Time action. Now, in addition to being able to set an absolute month, day, or year, you can now set an absolute date (that is, month, day, and year at the same time.)

CaliBrate update adds new feature

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to CaliBrate which adds a requested feature to the "shift event in time" action. You can now set an absolute year, month, or day.

CaliBrate allows you to search for and batch process multiple events in Calendar or iCal. With it, you can remove duplicate events, shift them in time, change titles or notes all at once, move them between calendars, and much more.

CaliBrate Updated for Mountain Lion, OmniGrowl Mountain Lion Support Improved

WBC today released updates to two of our applications: CaliBrate and OmniGrowl.

CaliBrate, which as been code signed for Gatekeeper support on OS X Mountain Lion, is now Mountain Lion compatible. It also improves support for iCloud on Lion and Mountain Lion. CaliBrate now properly distinguishes between event calendars and task (reminder or to-do) calendars.

CaliBrate allows you to search for and batch process multiple events in Calendar or iCal. With it, you can remove duplicate events, shift them in time, change titles or notes all at once, move them between calendars, and much more.

Today's update to OmniGrowl improves support for Mountain Lion. The interface is dynamically adjusted to refer to Calendar rather than iCal, Contacts rather than Address Book, and reminders rather than to-dos, as appropriate to the OS X system version. It also includes a number of bug fixes. Plug-in users especially are encouraged to see the version history for details.

These releases nearly completes our first round of updates for OS X Mountain Lion. All of our applications are ready for Mountain Lion, with the exception of ThinkArch. An update to ThinkArch is planned for August.

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.

iDupe, MoveTunes, DevonSync, and Osiris Updated for Mountain Lion

WBC today released updates to four more of our applications: iDupe, MoveTunes, DevonSync, and Osiris. Each of these applications has been code signed for Gatekeeper support on OS X Mountain Lion.

iDupe is an intelligent duplicate remover for iTunes. MoveTunes allows selective moving of iTunes music among volumes while retaining metadata. DevonSync allows synching additions and changes to DEVONthink Pro databases over a local network. Osiris is an auto-poster for the usenet newsreaders Thoth and MT-NewsWatcher.

Other than the code signing, significant revisions were made to DevonSync. Since MobileMe has been discontinued by Apple, support for MobileMe synching has been removed, and so DevonSync now works with local networking only. Reliance on the OS X system keychain has been completely replaced by blowfish encryption for passwords, meaning that full support for Lion and higher is now in place at long last.

These releases continue our first round of updates for OS X Mountain Lion. OmniGrowl and Cast Away have already been updated. CaliBrate and ThinkArch updates will follow in July.

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.

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.

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.