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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.   Posted by rosyna at August 25, 2008 03:28 PMTrackback Pings: TrackBack URL for this entry: Related:
Comments
I enjoy the Easter egg of sorts as it was what the Mac developers' used to do. Nowadays, everything is so "corporate." Posted by: F451 on August 25, 2008 3:56 PMI am sorry but in Unsanity's case they need to be a little more corporate. I have emailed them twice (once back in February and once a few weeks ago) about one of their products (WindowShade X) not allowing me to register with the code I purchased and I haven't even received an "oh we're sorry about that and we will look into it when we get the time" response. I know this isn't the place to voice issues like this but after getting no reply through the correct channels what else am I supposed to do? Posted by: Twist on August 25, 2008 6:16 PMI enjoy a bit of fun in the products I buy as much as anyone else. But when that "fun" surprises me and starts impeding my daily work, I get a little testy (it happens with no warning, and the animations make the menus impossible to read). And since there was no way to turn it off (that I could find), I had to waste a half an hour down grading back to beta 2 to get my work done. If only there was a way to turn it off, I would have been annoyed for only a second or two (by the surprise). Had it also been turn off by default, and I was told about it, I would have likely played with a bit, then turn it of and got on with my work. Keep it if you like, but make sure I'm in control of the "fun" I choose. Posted by: rtcdude on August 26, 2008 12:24 AMI thought the silliness was fun. I wouldn't want a company like unsanity to become corporate. Please keep it in, probably default it to off. When I got 1.3b4 the first thing I did was turn on the extra silliness. I had thought I would get tired of it with b3, but I haven't. It would be better with even more and better tested (for visibility) animations. Posted by: entropydave on August 26, 2008 12:29 AMI'd leave it in and set the default to off. It certainly woke me up yesterday when I first saw it! Posted by: Chris Moss on August 26, 2008 5:59 AMI was amused by the animated menu backgrounds (and demoed them for my wife). I turned them off as soon as I located an earlier beta. When I upgraded to beta 4, I disabled the silly preference ASAP. It was a tad disappointing to wait thru another Restart to get Finder's menus back (cuz I don't like to force Finder to relaunch). I'd say leave the feature in, have it off by default, and (as I mentioned elsewhere), make the System Prefs window taller so that there's more room for the list of menu changes. Posted by: Ward on August 26, 2008 10:52 AMLeave it! It made me smile all day. But, I admit, I went in and deleted the red and white splash thingy and one other. I couldn't read through them. Leave as an option to enable/disable. I want that light tunnel back! Posted by: jcriglar on August 26, 2008 3:07 PMSilly effects; Thanks, I think I will delay upgrading for the moment to 1.4.3 - I rather like the silly effects and would like to keep them a bit longer. Are they still there in the non-beta version? Posted by: Chris Moss on August 27, 2008 7:49 AMThey are not there in the final. There were still some nagging bugs, nigh universal hatred of them, and the inability to be allowed to redistribute some great Quartz Composer documents. Also, the nigh universal hatred played a large factor. Perhaps in the future. Posted by: Rosyna on August 27, 2008 8:04 AMPersonally, I liked your own brown wrapping paper(?) menu. It was readable and unobtrusive. Posted by: Geoff on August 27, 2008 11:53 AMPfft, twas supposed to be parchment. It's thin construction paper, soaked in water, frozen in the freezer, set on fire, then dried out. When it was all dry, I scanned it using a Canon Lide 25 thingy. It was meant to show what kind of things can be done with the animations with people that have far more artistic ability than I. Posted by: Rosyna on August 27, 2008 8:55 PMWhoah... I'm glad I've been on the ball with these updates and managed to get hold of 1.4.3b4 before 1.4.3 came out. I like the silly effects a lot, I'll be sticking at 1.4.3b4 for now :) Posted by: The Master on August 28, 2008 1:50 AMI would pay a VUF for Mighty Mouse. It may not be as sexy as some of your other products but I sure miss my larger custom cursor. Posted by: on August 28, 2008 12:57 PMRosyna, since you were in Japan I am sure that saw all the wonderful handmade papers. There are some shops in Southern California that sell them. Too bad so many got so bent on the creative aspect of Menu Master...their loss. Posted by: F451 on August 28, 2008 2:13 PM"I would pay a VUF for Mighty Mouse. It may not be as sexy as some of your other products but I sure miss my larger custom cursor." I'll second that thought. Posted by: Ross on August 28, 2008 7:42 PMAre others receiving the spinning barber pole and no verification that an update is or is not available on the latest release of Silk 2.1.4 that is not a beta? Thanks. Posted by: F451 on August 30, 2008 9:08 AMTwist, I have also been trying to reach Unsanity regarding a license issue. I have sent multiple emails (probably around 10 by now) since April. I have also left a comment on the blog before, trying to reach them that way. I have never had any sort of response. I, too, am feeling extremely frustrated. Posted by: Noam on August 30, 2008 12:37 PMAre we EVER going to have a working Xounds again? It's never talked about, and it is the one program that I really miss in Leopard - my system is too dang quiet. In America, you find the easter egg, but in Soviet Russia, the easter egg finds YOU! Posted by: pbear on September 3, 2008 5:54 AMSo has anyone else noticed that with Fruit Menu 3.7.1 the recent folders submenu doesn't update until you log out and back in again ? OS 10.5.4/ 2x2.22 core duo 2 - Jay Posted by: Jay on September 6, 2008 9:22 AMI've noticed that windowshade doesn't seem to work with iTunes 8. Double-clicking on the main window title bar makes it minimize into the dock. - Jay Posted by: Jay on September 11, 2008 2:02 PMDoes WindowShade work with Firefox 3 on your machine? On my it still doesn't... Firefox 3 seems to be working OK here. It's only iTunes 8 that has a problem on my machine. It's very strange, it windowshades once and then any double clicking on the titlebar after that minimizes it to the dock. - Jay Posted by: Jay on September 12, 2008 4:52 PMSame behavior on my computer for iTunes. For Firefox, it depends on the page displayed! Sometimes it works and sometimes it does nothing. Posted by: Gérald Tenenbaum on September 13, 2008 2:56 AMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated. |