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:
- Note: The price of Menu Master has increase from $10 to $12.
- This is a free update.
- Addressed some comments made about the something "special and silly". So many angry comments....
- Included a sample of something silly in Libary/Application Support/Unsanity/Menu Master/1. MenuEvil.qtz. I have no skills of an artist, so this is just an example of what can be done with the something special and silly (and it publishes "MenuItems" and "SelectedMenuItem" inputs).
- Added documentation to the read me about how to use the silliness and resources on how to get more information on the silliness.
- Added some roundish rectangular (squircle) things to the second tab of the Menu Master preference pane.
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
Apple's Quartz Composer mailing list
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.
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
- Added compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5.
- APE now requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and will not install on older versions of Mac OS X.
- The APE preference pane will now state why it is disabled on Mac OS X 10.6.
- Added an updater to APE, set to automatically check weekly, by default.
- Reduced the number of unpatchables on PowerPC (includes APELite).
- Addressed some cosmetic issues in the preference pane.
- Application Enhancer will now refuse to load any APE module that is not marked as compatible with 10.5 on Mac OS X 10.5.
- Addressed some problems with some unpatchables due to the wonkiness of the x86 ABI (Includes APELite).
- The APE prefpane now shows why some APE modules cannot be loaded.
- Removed all references to the Rosetta workaround as Apple fixed that bug in Mac OS X 10.4.9 and the workaround no longer has any beneficial results.
- Worked around a prebinding bug in Mac OS X 10.4.10 and earlier that made APE treat some applications as if they were on the exclude list.
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
Download APE SDK 2.5
The now condensed release notes are the following:
- Updated to support Mac OS X 10.5
- The Installer plugin now checks to make sure SCR has the correct permissions on 10.5.
- Now supports registering for SCR in Info.plist entries of bundles (Frameworks, QuickTime plugins, Photoshop plugins, Safari plugins, et cetera). Developers no longer need to call UnsanitySCR_RegisterMatchSpecifier() bundles (in most cases).
- SDK: UnsanitySCR_Install now installs Smart Crash Reports with the correct permissions required to work on Mac OS X 10.5.
- SDK: UnsanitySCR_Install now pretends as if SCR is not installed if it is installed inside the user's home folder on Mac OS X 10.5.x as Mac OS X 10.5 will not load SCR from the user's home folder. Behaves as before on Mac OS X 10.4.x.
- SDK: Worked around a problem on Mac OS X that led to repeated calls UnsanitySCR_RegisterMatchSpecifier creating new entries in SCR's preferences when Mac OS X thought that two equal CFTypeRefs were not equal.
- SDK: On Mac OS X 10.5.x, UnsanitySCR_Install no longer allows you to install in a non-global manner due to the new restrictions in Mac OS X 10.5.x. Behaviour on Mac OS X 10.4.x is unchanged.
- Important Note: On Mac OS X 10.5.x, Smart Crash Reports must not be installed in the user's home folder (~/) as it will prevent SCR from loading even if SCR is installed globally. If you are a developer installing SCR, make sure SCR is not in the user's home folder on Mac OS X 10.5.x and move it to the trash (FSMoveObjectToTrashSync()) if possible.
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:
- Note: The price of FruitMenu has increased from $10 to $12. (This increase will take effect sometime Tuesday.)
- This is a free upgrade.
- Added support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard v10.5 and later.
- Dropped support for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. FruitMenu now requires Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger v10.4.11 or later.
- Removed all references to QuickTime. Now uses the superior ImageIO functionality to work with images. This has an unintended side effect of decreasing FruitMenu's load time at application launch.
- Removed a lot of deprecated APIs and replaced them with modern, non-deprecated versions.
- Removed some calls to the private CPS (CoreProcess Services) APIs when there was a public replacement (many CPS functions still lack a replacement in 10.5.x).
- Changed the gather option to choose a folder name based on the current user's locale settings.
- Added some spin locks and less trans fat.
- Significantly reduced application launch time by only loading preference panes on demand.
- Includes APE 2.5.
- Includes SCR 1.5.
- Plea: If you've bought FruitMenu around four years ago and have never paid for it again (we've not charged for an update of FruitMenu) we kindly ask if you wouldn't mind paying a voluntary upgrade fee. This fee is completely voluntary, is not required, and FruitMenu itself has no knowledge of whether you have volunteered or not. There are no perks to volunteer and we only ask that only registered users volunteer. To volunteer, please go to http://www.unsanity.com/store/add/fruitmenu_vuf.
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.
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!)
- Addressed an issue that could cause Apple-only crash reports to be sent to a third party if the user clicked the cancel button.
- Made some UI improvements when cancelling a send.
- Now properly shows which company it is sending a crash report to when sending to company and Apple.
- The Installer plugin now checks to make sure SCR has the correct permissions on 10.5.
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.
- Added an updater to APE, set to automatically check weekly, by default.
- Reduced the number of unpatchables on PowerPC (includes APELite).
- Addressed some cosmetic issues in the preference pane.
- The APE preference pane will now state why it is disabled on Mac OS X 10.6.
Download APE 2.5b2
Download APE SDK 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.
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.