Labels X 1.8 is out, and it's Intel compatible! Ho Ho Ho, and all that jazz. I highly recommend grabbing this even if you're on a PowerPC Mac as it greatly improves memory usage, and everything.

Mandatory version history:

• This upgrade is free for all registered users.
• Labels X is now a Universal haxie, meaning it will work on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs (Mac OS X 10.3.9 and newer only).
• Greatly improved per-process memory usage.
• Includes Application Enhancer 2.0.2.
• Includes Smart Crash Reports 1.2.1 (optional install).

Download: http://unsanity.net/labels-x-18.dmg

What happens when you give 13 Macintosh developers three days to write a holiday themed application for charity? You get A Holiday Cocoa Duel (At Ten Paces)!

These guys have come up with some insanely cool stuff! Check it out, and vote for the one you like most by donating to that developer's charity! Winner gets a $20 gift from the rest of the devs!

And now that I'm done building all of the infrastructure for the event, maybe I can actually write an application for it, too. :)

...and you will want to check it more than twice!

MacSanta has arrived! It seems more and more software is going to be added to the list, so be sure to check back often between now and Christmas.

You can save 20% off all of our products as well as that of any of the other fine products listed! Just in time for the holidays. :)

You can jump directly to our store and save 20% with this link: MacSanta 20% Off. You can also just head to our store any time between now and the 25th and enter "MACSANTA" as your coupon code.

Happy Holidays!

After the unpleasantness of last week, it's time for something nice. Introducing A Holiday Cocoa Duel At Ten Paces!

The duel is a charity event in which Mac OS X developers battle it out for supremacy (and beer). The developers write small holiday-themed applications, and you pick which one you like most by donating to that developer's charity of choice! So far, the competitors are Gus Mueller, John Casasanta and me.

If you've got an idea for a fun and simple holiday-themed app and some programming skills, please participate! Or if you know an OS X programmer, pass the word along!

And be sure to check back Thursday morning to see what the contestants have come up with, and to pick your favorite!

I'd like to apologize publicly to Gus and Paul for my last post. While my factual points stand, calling the two of them out by name was unprofessional, unclassy, and uncalled for. I should have made an attempt to discuss the issue with them privately before blogging about it, and I didn't.

I think I was bitten by the classic rule of emails, which also applies to blog posts - they are tone deaf, and one should always assume that the recipient will understand them using the most negative of possible interpretations. I was also bitten by the well-known rule, "don't write rebuttals while angry."

This has been ugly. I hope it's over. And I hope it doesn't happen again.

Have you heard!? It's the Week of the Independent Mac Developer!!!!!!!

And how can I tell? Because the whole blogosphere is lighting up with people concerned about my welfare as a developer. Truly, I am blessed to have such a supportive group of professional compadrés! Wait, what's that you say? It's not really me that these bloggers are concerned about!? Say it ain't so!!!

Okay, enough of the cutesie intro. If you haven't been paying attention, MacHeist began selling its bundle this week, which includes one of our Unsanity products, ShapeShifter. The bundle sells a ton of good software (plus my product, haha) at a hefty discount. And gives part of the proceeds to charity. And, word on the proverbial street is that this is somehow "bad".

The basic gist of the argument seems to be that it's bad because MacHeist takes home a disproportionate share of the kitty. My take is that I don't give the first damn how much money MacHeist makes on this. If it's a good deal for me (which it is), it is completely immaterial whether or not it's also a good deal for the MacHeist people. They came up with a great idea in which everybody benefits. People are willing to give them money for this good idea. I'm satisfied with my take, the other participating developers also appear to also be pleased, and that pretty much wraps up the argument.

For the record, here's the pro/con rundown on participating in this event:

• I get paid. Win For Me!
• I get new customers who might purchase upgrades in the future. Win For Me!
• I have increased support costs. Unsanity's products are fairly complex, so we already have a robust support mechanism in place, which mitigates this issue for us. You, Random Developer, might not. Use your own discretion. Lose For Me
• Users get something fun to play with for a month that gets them excited about their Mac and the Mac ecosystem. Win For Users and All Mac Developers!
• Users get to purchase something that they want for less money than they would normally need to pay. Win For Users!
• Users who have already purchased Mac Independent Software once are more likely to do so again. Win For All Mac Developers!
• The people behind MacHeist make money from these purchases. Win for the MacHeist Peeps!
• It is alleged that the perceived value of all software goes down. Boolhonkay. See Exhibit One: Basic Freshman economics for more info. Invalid Claim
• A variety of charities get large contributions. Win For Humanity!
• I am instrumental in a variety of charities getting large contributions. Win For My Karma!

One point in the above deserves fleshing out a bit. I believe that users who purchase the MacHeist bundle are more likely to purchase other Indie Mac Software in the future. The Macintosh software ecosystem is an economy. Economies are not zero-sum games in which the participants choose which of many options to purchase, purchase it, and then never purchase anything again. Instead, they purchase one item, get both a productivity boost and an enjoyment boost out of it, and will tend to allocate more of their limited resources towards the Mac ecosystem in the future. Let me reiterate, Random Mac Developer - when a user purchases your product, it is good for my business.

So to recap, MacHeist pays me to advertise my product, while making money themselves, from users who have been entertained for free for a month after which they get an opportunity to buy something they may have wanted to purchase anyway at a steep discount, which makes them more inclined to purchase again, all while giving money to charity. This is bad?

I don't care how much money MacHeist makes by this. It doesn't change the fact that it's a good deal for everyone involved.

Now, you may notice a lot of sarcasm in this post. It's 'cause I'm pissed off!. I've been blind-sided twice now by my professional peers in as many months. The first time, I was accused of causing the downfall of the Mac by my participation in the "sizzle-not-steak" that is My Dream App and Disco's Smoke. And now this. To be perfectly clear, I'm angry because Paul and Gus have insulted me and everybody involved in these projects. These guys have dissed our software and our business acumen twice in two months, whether outright or by implication. They write Mac software themselves, and so do I, and as a form of professional courtesy, I somehow manage to refrain from publicly insulting them and their products. I expect the same civility in return…

Here's what I don't expect to have leveled at me from my professional associates, quoted from Gus's post:

Well, that's a big crock of shit. How about this alternate title: "The Week Where You Devalue and Fleece A Bunch of Good Mac Devs". Yea, that sounds more like it.
…
But for MacHeist to call it "The Week of the Independent Mac Developer" and to practically give away the software... well, that's just a fucking insult to me and all the other hard working developers out there.

Yup, there's a lil' something called professional courtesy. Briefly put, it means that you don't Poop on your Professional Peers Publicly. And yet, that's what these gentlemen have done, twice in two months.

What makes this even worse is that I considered Gus and Paul to be, if not friends, then at least amicable acquaintances. I respect(ed) them and their work, and I'd assumed that the feeling was reciprocated. We've met in real life, had beers, dinners, and so on. But have I received any private correspondence about these issues? Not a bit of it. Just public insults without any validity.

At this point, I don't really know what to do. These gents obviously have an axe to grind, but I have no idea what their motivation is. I hope and suspect that it's that they are just aesthetically disinclined towards marketing. If that's the case, maybe we can find some middle ground, have some sort of a Cocoa Dual at Ten Paces. The alternative is that they're trying to rip down our efforts to boost their own, that they're treating the Mac Software Market as a zero-sum game and trying to improve their standing at the expense of ours. If that's the case, they are deserving of nothing but scorn. I sincerely hope it's the former and that we can find some way of meeting in the middle and regaining our mutual respect.

In any case, these guys are ripping into their professional associates publicly because their professional associates dared to do something which benefits everybody. All I can say is show some class.

I can't really explain this. There's this "fad" called ghost riding the whip. It's an incredibly stupid thing being done mostly by Upper-Middle class and Upper class male idiots. Despite its name, ghost riding the whip is not gansta. It's what mostly bored, well-to-do teenagers do when they can't actually commit any "real" crimes. It's also a "perfect" activity for bored people living in Canadia.

On a side note, I can somehow imagine Cabel doing a video that mocks this fad. Something like Ghost Riding a parked minivan while he does a review of the Wii while showing off his lovely hands.

Here are some examples:

And here's a video about the dangers involved when doing this stupid, stupid activity (warning: strong language):

I can't express in words how dumb this is.

The reason this came up was a recent article about some kid that died from doing this activity (as it seems to me, at least). The article blames Jackass. OMGWTFBBQ?! I haven't watched many episodes of Jackass, but I don't think they've ever done this. Furthermore, whatever happened to personal responsibility. Why can't people just be called stupid if they're doing something like this? Why does someone have to blame the action on someone else? After all, World War II wasn't caused by video games, AFAIK.

So finally, our last remaining not Intel compatible haxie, Labels X, is making its rounds to the Intel compatible land. Among Intel compatiblity we've also improved the per-process memory usage of the haxie. The "old" code that was rewritten from scratch ages back to early 2002, and it had the "we gotta allocate plenty of memory to make sure we never run out of it" approach. Now it's fully dynamic (as in "get it when we need it" approach), and as a result, the footprint Labels X puts on the app's memory is... minimal. So even if you don't use an Intel Mac, you're more than welcome to upgrade.

Note that 1.8 loses 10.2 compatibility, it now requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer.

The Link: http://unsanity.net/beta/labels-x-18b1.dmg

In case you missed it, Chat Transcript Manager has been updated to version 1.1.1.

This version fixes a crash on startup under Mac OS X 10.3.9 (that's what you get for not paying attention to project checkboxes in Xcode and let "fast objc dispatch" slip by); it also corrects parsing of some Fire logs that caused 1.1 to either not load certain transcripts or quit unexpectedly while doing so.

Last but not least, thanks to our awesome localizers, this version re-adds Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese and Русскую localizations.

Download at: ctm-111.dmg