Cast Away 2.9.2 released

Cast Away 2.9.2 has been released. It fixes a rare issue which caused Cast Away to always abort a removal when it starts. Please see the version history for details.

CaliBrate 1.7.3 released

CaliBrate 1.7.3 fixes a single bug that would cause searching for annual all-day duplicates to fail with an unknown error. Please see the version history.

OmniGrowl 3.7 and GeekTool 3: A clarification

One reader posted a negative comment on OmniGrowl's page on versiontracker, the gist of which was that he was upset that OmniGrowl seemed (in the release notes) to be making an "ill-advised jab at GeekTool" and was claiming to replace it.

Since we agree that the release notes could have been more clear, here is our reply to that comment:

We love GeekTool and have been using it for years. We love GeekTool 3 even more. The "better solution" we're talking about is specifically how to display iTunes track info and artwork on the desktop using GeekTool. We wrote one of those ourselves a long time ago and published it in WBC iTunes Scripts Collection. Similar solutions have been posted on several blogs, MacOSXHints, etc. The existing solutions have 3 limitations:

1. They all involve running 2 separate scripts (one for artwork and one for track info), and polling iTunes on a regular basis (several times a minute). This puts a huge tax on iTunes and eventually, in our opinion, makes iTunes unusable and therefore makes this kind of solution not really work.
2. The track info and the artwork is usually out-of-sync.
3. You have to have embedded artwork.

So, what we mean by OmniGrowl being a "much better solution for GeekTool users than anything currently available" is that it handles things differently:

1. OmniGrowl uses the distributed notifications system to be alerted of iTunes track changes, and doesn't need to constantly poll iTunes.
2. one plugin updates GeekTool at the same time, and uses the new AppleScript support in GeekTool to tell it when to refresh.
3. if you have the option to download artwork from the internet on (or even if you don't and OmniGrowl is getting the artwork from iTunes), then OmniGrowl is already caching an image file, so there is no duplication of this task on iTunes or the system.*

Beyond that it is really easy to set up. Just rename a provided template and then create two new geeklets in GeekTool with specific names. So as a GeekTool user too, please just try it and then comment back what you think! Thanks. (Viva GeekTool)

* For the even more technically inclined, I would add to the comment as posted on VersionTracker by saying that also, OmniGrowl will only cache artwork once per album rather than constantly copying a cache file over another cache file. Also OmniGrowl has an embedded transparent png file in the application bundle, so there's no need to copy that around the system either.

OmniGrowl 3.7 released

OmniGrowl 3.7 has been released. This is a big update focused on iTunes artwork support. OmniGrowl now downloads album artwork from the internet, so even if the show full iTunes notification is not selected (which is less burdensome on iTunes), you can still see artwork in the notification. Related plugins & additions have been included. Most notably is a script to add the downloaded artwork to the album in iTunes, and a plugin template for GeekTool 3 which allows you to show the artwork and track info on your desktop with some minimal configuration of GeekTool. Please see the version history for details.

CaliBrate 1.7.2 released

CaliBrate 1.7.2 has been released. It addresses a specific need: to deal with a certain type of event corruption on Snow Leopard. Please see version history for details.

Issues with Tiger Intel

As I blogged yesterday, the Apple developer tools on Snow Leopard have some major bugs which make compiling for backwards compatibility very difficult or impossible. We knew that there were issues with iDupe 2.6 on intel macs running Leopard specifically. We managed to work around these bugs to create iDupe 2.7 which does work on intel macs on Leopard (as well as tested successfully on 10.6.1, 10.5.8 PPC & Intel, and 10.4.11 PPC). However, we now have one report that iDupe 2.7 won't launch on 10.4.11 intel. Unfortunately, as we don't have this configuration to test, there's not much we can do to work around the problem without Apple addressing it. So, if you find any of the WBC don't work on your platform, we urge you to report it. In the meantime, it is very likely that an older build will work just fine. Although we continue to add features to our products, the last round of updates did focus on compatibility upgrades for Snow Leopard, so if you're not on Snow Leopard yet, the older versions should still suit your needs. Thanks.

iDupe 2.7 released

iDupe 2.7 has been released. It focuses on supporting iTunes 9, and fixing some major compiler bugs that affected particular systems, mainly intel Macs running Leopard (OS X 10.5). If your system was affected, you would have seen -3 code errors after scanning. iDupe 2.7 is a major under-the-hood update to support as many systems as possible. There are two positive side-effects of the changes: 1) Since use of the Finder is greatly reduced, iDupe will likely perform faster, and 2) iDupe may now work on FileVault systems and certain network-based volumes where it did not before, but this is yet untested. Your feedback will be helpful as it is not possible for WBC to test these configurations. Please see version history for details.