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September 20, 2008
Spectacular Catastrophe: WindowShade 4.2b2
And thus, it is thrust upon this world.  There is one small change to this update. The donate panel in the preference pane has been removed. It has been replaced with a voluntary upgrade fee (vuf) panel. This is mostly because WSX is like totally 7 years old. Seven Freakin' Years Anywho, here's what's new in beta 2:
Some of these changes should please some people. Not much to say other than happy window shading!
September 15, 2008
Feel the Heat That's All Around You; Flashing Lights and Ecstasy Surround You: The Silly Effect and John Gruber
When we first put the "Silly Effect" effect in Menu Master, a lot of users complained about it, as you can see by looking at the comments for Menu Master on JesusUpdate. I mean a lot of users. I had never seen such angry comments about a feature before. (We got more angry comments via email too). 
We've seen more than a couple of reports that MeMa 1.4.3 doesn't like Adobe applications on Mac OS X 10.4.11. Something to do with the Help menu and the mouse cursor position. While we could reproduce it in the beta builds, we fixed MeMa to do the right thing, or so we thought. Please Help! If anyone is experiencing odd problems with Menu Master 1.4.3 and Adobe applications, please email us a System Profiler report (Apple Menu ☞ About This Mac ☞ More Info…) and a screenshot of your screen immediately after the problem (Command-Shift-3, a new file named Picture N.png (where N is a number) will appear on your desktop, send us that). The Silly Effect is Back; It Wants Blood The Silly Effect is a cheesy animation option developed over the course of a few weekends on May 26th, 2006 (over two years ago). It has been in hibernation since then. Silly Effects puts a Quartz Composer document animation in the background of a menu. By default, these documents are culled from Library/Application Support/Unsanity/Menu Master/ in both your user folder and the main Library folder (Local Domain and User Domain). There are also a number of quartz composer documents included in the Menu Master.ape application enhancer bundle. These included quartz composer documents are from Futurismo Zugakousaku's excellent Quartz Composer Lab study, used with permission. If you wish to create your own snazzy animation and are familiar with Quartz Composer, Quartz Composer documents can use two inputs that Menu Master makes available to them. "SelectedMenuItem", which is the name of the currently selected menu item (you may want to filter out "-", the separator), and "MenuItems", which is an array structure containing the names of all the menu items in a menu.
Apple's Quartz Composer Documentation Futurismo Zugakousaku's excellent Quartz Composer Lab study (contains a lot of excellent Quartz Composer documents, some are included with Menu Master). What's new in this version of Menu Master 1.4.8b1? Control is what's new.
There are a few known issues with this release, but they are mostly minor aside from the Safari 4.0 bug (which is a bug in JavaScriptCore). Download Menu Master 1.4.8b1 (after installing this, you'll get notices of new Menu Master betas until 1.4.8 is released)
Despite our much publicized interactions with the programmers at Barebones, we highly recommend BBEdit. It is a highly useful text editor that we at Unsanity could not do without. (In fact this post was made with the help of BBEdit). Neither SlickEdit 2008 nor Notepad++ can hold a candle to BBEdit (although I've yet to personally check out the new BBEdit 9).
August 25, 2008
Purified Chicken Embryo Cell, The VUF, and Menu Master Beta
The response to the voluntary upgrade fee for FruitMenu was freakin' amazing. It far, far exceeded our hopes and we give our gratitude to everyone that did the VUF.  Once again, I want to give thanks to all those that participated in the VUF and to all those that plan to participate. Let's have a chat about Menu Master For the last year and a half (18 months), every Menu Master beta has included a "Silly Effect". Most people never noticed this because it would only appear in one or two applications (TextEdit and Safari). The Silly Effect itself was created over the span of two weeks way back when, and polished so it could be shown off to users. It looks something like this (but animated):  Anywho, that's how it was in Menu Master one point four point three beta three. And then there was the anger. So much anger and so much ire. Some people claimed it was a bug. Some people tried repairing permissions, being unable to tie the new behaviour to the software they just installed that mentioned "silly". Some people went completely "psycho". (For what it's worth, he was told not to share the key because it had already been changed to something else in the codebase for beta four). If anyone has seen any other public forums with posts that complain about b3, please email the links to us or put the URL in the comments. Before releasing the third beta, we were a little worried that not that many people use Menu Master (MeMa from now on). Well, putting in that "new" feature and defaulting it to on with so many animations (some very hard to read) definitely taught us something. People that love MeMa... really love it. We'd also like to apologize to anyone that lost work or had a drop in productivity while the animations were showing. What's new in 1.4.3b4?  Here are the release notes:
Here is what has been added to the read me: Silly Effects Silly Effects is a cheesy animation option developed over the course of a few weekends over a year ago. There was no work needed to make it compatible with Mac OS X 10.5. Silly Effects puts a Quartz Composer document animation in the background of a menu. By default, these documents are culled from Library/Application Support/Unsanity/Menu Master/ in both your user folder and the main Library folder (Local Domain and User Domain). There are also a number of quartz composer documents included in the Menu Master.ape application enhancer bundle. However, these are not loaded by default. If you wish to load these bundled animations, check "Include Bundled Animations" in the Menu Master preference pane. If you wish to create your own snazzy animation and are familiar with Quartz Composer, Quartz Composer documents can use two inputs that Menu Master makes available to them. "SelectedMenuItem", which is the name of the currently selected menu item (you may want to filter out "-", the separator), and "MenuItems", which is an array structure containing the names of all the menu items in a menu. More information on Quartz Composer can be found at: Apple's Quartz Composer Documentation Futurismo Zugakousaku's excellent Quartz Composer Lab study (contains a lot of excellent Quartz Composer documents) Do we remove it or keep it in? Now that people have seen the silly effects, should we keep them in MeMa (but disabled by default) or should we just remove the entire thing, so no one can enable them? Of course, if we decide to keep it in for the final, we would really like some better looking animations than that MenuEvil.qtz thing I made. I do not have the skills of an artist. If anyone does have the skills, and is willing to let us use your work in MeMa, we would greatly appreciate it. Other Stuff Well, there's been two betas of MeMa released and still no new fansubbed episode of Detective Conan has been released. I weep. Also, please do respond in the comments here on the "keep or trash issue" and the Menu Master voluntary upgrade fee. Please state your reasons if you don't mind. Important Note: the final version of MeMa will be released super quickly fast depending on the results of this post. So I'd like to see some responses to this post by the time I wake up tomorrow. I've already been awake for 24+ hours. Although, there might be a reprieve if a new Detective Conan fansub is released.
August 18, 2008
New Releases: APE 2.5, SCR 1.5, FruitMenu 3.7
Over the last three days, we've released the final versions of Application Enhancer 2.5, Smart Crash Reports 1.5, and FruitMenu 3.7. Application Enhancer 2.5 and APE SDK 2.5 
 Remember, if you want to know more about the background of APE 2.5 or any other release mentioned here, see the post entitled "Enthusiastic Trepidation". Download APE 2.5  The now condensed release notes are the following:
The biggest issue with SCR, by far, was making sure the permissions were correct for Mac OS X 10.5 and making sure SCR wasn't installed previously in ~/Library/InputManagers/. If it was, remove it from the current user's Library. Download Smart Crash Reports 1.5  Here are the condensed final release notes for FruitMenu 3.7:
A lot of people have commented on this blog and via email that they would gladly pay for FruitMenu again once the final release was out. However, if you feel you want to "give" money but don't want to give the whole amount, then the voluntary upgrade fee (vuf) might be more kosher to your tastes (Ketchup or Catsup?). Please Note: There are no perks or benefits to paying the vuf. FruitMenu is not aware of anyone that opts to pays the vuf. And paying the vuf will not get you an additional code as the vuf is not tied into the SN system. It's completely optional, there is no pressure. The vuf is mostly targeted to users that purchased FruitMenu some four years ago. Since we've never charged for an update to FruitMenu so far, the amount of revenue coming from FruitMenu is low as we've nearly saturated the market of people that would install FruitMenu and thus, would pay for it. The reason FruitMenu was the first non-free software we released for Mac OS X 10.5 is that it was the product where the least amount of changes were required to run on Mac OS X 10.5. Most of the changes in FruitMenu 3.7 were done to decrease application launch time (the performance factor) when FruitMenu was installed. A few people have complained that the performance increases cause the System Preferences item to take "forever" to load on the first display per application. We figured it was a decent compromise to reduce the application load time. In order to decrease the first display time of System Preferences (and improve the performance of other parts of FruitMenu), FruitMenu is going to need some logic rewrite. We figured it'd be best to get a final version of FruitMenu 3.7 now and include more performance optimizations in a future update. Other stuff Expect a new Menu Master beta sometime around when a new fansubbed episode of Detective Conan is released. Please note that we will not update this blog when a new beta of a product already in beta is posted. However, all the links in previous posts will download the new betas, even if they say they are for old betas. And new betas will be available via the updater if you have an old beta installed.
August 06, 2008
Dear APE, I want you inside me. Love, Leopard #2: APE 2.5b2
Uhm... Well, I didn't have this post very well thought out. Usually I dwell on blog posts for weeks while in the shower, but all I had for this post was the title and the photo.  Of course, there are some exceptions. For example, Smart Crash Reports 1.5b3 was released a few weeks ago (it's also a part of FruitMenu 3.7b3 and higher). SCR does not include an updater (there's no need... yet) so I will state what's new on this post (ugh, that's not creative writing!)
Download Smart Crash Reports 1.5b3 The really big news of course is Application Enhancer 2.5b2. We really, really didn't want a repeat of what happened with older versions of APE (re: previous post). I mean, we really didn't want it. To that end, we've added an updater to APE itself. By default, it checks for updates weekly (or when the system version changes). If you install APE 2.5b2, I'd like you to change update checking (in the Application Enhancer preference pane) to daily. Some third-party APE module developers asked if they could disable the update check when the user installed their software. We have decided against allowing it to be changed on install by anyone other than the computer user. I mean, "the problem" only occurred because some third parties were shipping very old versions of APE with their products (re: previous post again). It'd kind of defeat the purpose of the updater if it could so easily be controlled by third-party software.
Download APE 2.5b2 Finally, there is a new beta of FruitMenu that includes APE 2.5b2 and SCR 1.5b3. However, you'd have to use the updater to get the new beta. We are desperately trying to get people to use the updaters. Once again, I'd like to repeat the warning stated on previous posts in this category. I'm sorry if it seems harsh, but it has to be said. Note: Please do not post comments and/or send emails asking about the present and/or future of things not mentioned in this post. Such comments will be moderated, deleted, or edited. When we have something to say about other products, it will be posted, and not a moment before then. Asking us about ETAs just ends up wasting both of our time. Apologies for taking such a harsh stance, but the only thing we would tell you is "it'll be done when it's done" and we're trying to prevent a repeat of the tens of thousands of comments/emails we've received asking for an ETA. Any kind of timeframe or ETA we could possibly give will be wrong and users get very disappointed when ETAs are missed. That's the nature of ETAs, they are always wrong. And due to the fact we won't release something before we feel it is ready, any ETA is even more likely to be missed.
On a happier note, I would like to state that SCR 1.5b3, FM 3.7b5, and APE 2.5b2 are nearly the final versions before actually being released in non-beta form. Except for the logging in FruitMenu, assume everything to be final and do not treat the software as beta quality in your mind. Speaking of the logging in FruitMenu, we are looking for any large values attached to "CreateMenuItem:" as listed in the console. We especially want to know if any operation takes longer than 200ms. This information will be used to increase FruitMenu's loading speed in the future. Price Increases Abound On a final note, the prices of the haxies are going up as the Leopard-compatible versions are released. FruitMenu, for example, is increasing from $10 to $12. The reason for this price increase is the sad state the US economy is in (seriously, Canadian funny money is worth more than the US dollar, OMGWTFBBQ?!). The price increases of other products have not been decided on yet. |
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Recent Entries
Spectacular Catastrophe: WindowShade 4.2b2
Feel the Heat That's All Around You; Flashing Lights and Ecstasy Surround You: The Silly Effect and John Gruber Purified Chicken Embryo Cell, The VUF, and Menu Master Beta New Releases: APE 2.5, SCR 1.5, FruitMenu 3.7 Dear APE, I want you inside me. Love, Leopard #2: APE 2.5b2 Enthusiastic Trepidation Pragmatic Disillusionment Apple Punishes Those That File Bugs on Their Precious Leopard Leopard! Smart Crash Reports: 300!
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