Spectacular Catastrophe: WindowShade 4.2b2

And thus, it is thrust upon this world.

If there are no humungous (rada rada) issues with this beta 2 of WindowShade X 4.2, then it will be cleaned up a little and released sometime next week. I strongly suggest everyone changing the update check to daily as 4.2b2 won't be around that long.

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:

• The price of WindowShade X has increased from $10 to $13.50.
• MIP windows no longer appear below the bottom of the screen in 10.5.
• MIP windows now respect the Dock size in 10.5.
• No longer uses CGSUniqueCString().
• Addressed a bug that caused a MIP window to expand into an invisible window when clicking on the Dock icon when all windows in the application are MIPped.
• Now allows windowshading of the iTunes 8 window when double clicking on the title bar.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when closing all windows (option click close widget) in Cocoa applications.
• Addressed an issue that rendered WindowShade useless in Firefox 3.x.

Some of these changes should please some people.

Download WindowShade X 4.2b2

Not much to say other than happy window shading!

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).

So the Silly Effect was removed from Menu Master 1.4.3. And then we started getting emails from people that were sad it was removed. OMGWTFBBQ?!, ya know? But first I wish to discuss something else.

That Darned Adobe Bug

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.

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, some are included with Menu Master).

What's new in this version of Menu Master 1.4.8b1? Control is what's new.

Note that this beta has the Silly Effects on by default. Also, these things are new:

• Re-enabled the Silly Effect.
• If you have a Safari 4.0 beta installed, do NOT use any Quartz Composer documents containing JavaScript, due to a bug in JavaScriptCore in Safari 4.0.
• The Silly Effect is on by default for this version as it needs testing.
• The Silly Effect will be off by the time MeMa 1.4.8 is final (3+5=8).
• Added support for the garbage collector in Silly Effect.
• Removed Support for garbage collected applications in Silly Effect. QC itself isn't very compatible with GC.
• There is now a prefpane tab dedicated to the Silly Effect. It allows you to disable or enable Quartz Composer Documents individually. All Screen Savers are disable by default as most are not suited for menus. If you disagree, turn it on.
• Got permission to include Mamoru Kano's (www.zugakousaku.com) excellent Quartz Composer documents. They are just astoundingly beautiful and awe inspiring. There is no adequate way to express how grateful we are for this.

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)

Other Important Stuff

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).