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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).   Posted by rosyna at September 15, 2008 08:20 AMTrackback Pings: TrackBack URL for this entry: Related:
Comments
Perhaps the only thing from Unsanity worse than the silly effect (for which I only requested a preference checkbox) is the nature of the blog feed posting an update every time a comment appears in a thread. What's up with that? Intentional? Posted by: Ben on September 15, 2008 1:21 PMIt is intentional. If you don't want to be notified of comments, go to the main unsanity.org page and subscribe to the RSS Summaries feed, which does not include comments. Posted by: Rosyna on September 15, 2008 1:25 PMSTILL NO SHAPESHIFTER UPDATES? Everyone really wants to just know if any progress at all has been made, whatsoever Posted by: Sam Clark on September 15, 2008 10:29 PMI'd be happy enough if there was SOME HINT as to what's going on with CHAT TRANSCRIPT MANAGER. The compatability page has listed a Leopard compatible beta almost since Leopard's release, but it's still nowhere to be seen for download. I paid good money for this app and sorely miss it... surely, since it doesn't even touch APE, it can't be so difficult to fix? Or am I the only registered user? :( Very glad to see the MM Silly Effect back though, finally I can upgrade! Posted by: The Master on September 16, 2008 8:32 AMSo 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. People are different. Surprise, surprise. ;-P Posted by: Eurobubba on September 16, 2008 9:16 AMHere we are almost a year later with no update to Shapeshifter for Leopard. Sigh..... Posted by: NameNotImporant on September 20, 2008 12:12 PMI don't think chat transcript manager requires APE or isn't compatible with Leopard. Isn't it a regular app? Posted by: Ilgaz on September 20, 2008 10:41 PMThere _is_ something wrong with Adobe Reader 8 and even 9 even if there is not a bit of APE in system. Keep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated. |