Ann Arbor, MI
November 30, 2011

Ann Arbor, MI - Mac users can enjoy both iDupe and CaliBrate, two of Wooden Brain Concepts’ flagship products, at a great discount from now until Christmas. Wooden Brain Concepts, a software company specializing in practical tools for Mac home users, has partnered with TheMacBundles for an exclusive discount in this season's holiday bundle as well as in its innovative Build Your Own Bundle stores, where people can put together their own discounted software packages.

“The two products we’re making available as part of this bundle are immensely useful tools for anyone who uses iTunes and iCal,” said Loren Ryter, President. “We know you’ll agree when you try them. That's why we're working with TheMacBundles - we want to get our software in more hands.”

“iDupe is a smart duplicates scanner for iTunes. iDupe makes smart decisions about which track in a set of identified duplicates to keep, rather than relying on a single criterion, as many other similar products do. You make the final decision about whether it picked the correct one, then let iDupe handle duplicate clean up from there.”

“CaliBrate, meanwhile, is a multi-purpose utility for iCal. It allows you to perform many batch functions with events, such as removing duplicates, adding or removing alarms, modifying titles and notes, moving events between calendars, and much more. Search criteria are extremely flexible, and you can save frequently used searches for later. CaliBrate is also able to create new events from text dropped onto its ‘Magic Hat’.”
TheMacBundles was setup by Steve Becker as a “Farmers’ Market” for software, essentially a co-op where software developers can bundle their software titles for maximum exposure. Users are protected by TheMacBundles' no-fine-print policy, which means that purchasers of its bundles get the same software, support, licenses, and upgrade benefits that apply to users who pay the full price for the software. That’s why TheMacBundles motto is: “No Games, No Hype, No Middlemen...Just Great Software at a Great Price™.”

This Holiday Bundle of 14 titles has a retail value of nearly $475 but sells for only $49.95, and includes both iDupe and CaliBrate, two of Wooden Brain Concepts’ top-selling applications.

TheMacBundles
Wooden Brain Concepts
iDupe
CaliBrate

Wooden Brain Concepts has been making Mac software for well over 10 years. Besides iDupe and CaliBrate, its popular products include OmniGrowl (which provides all kinds of practical notifications using Growl) and Cast Away (a utility to customize podcast management and auto-playback on a per-podcast basis). Wooden Brain Concepts believes in affordable software and the true principle of shareware.

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Loren Ryter
President
Wooden Brain Concepts
woodenbrain@kagi.com

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to MoveTunes to fix an issue involving retaining playlists.

After a recent iTunes update, the option to retain playlists had ceased working due to a change made in iTunes involving a shift from "Audiobooks" to just "Books". This has now been fixed.

MoveTunes is a utility to selectively move iTunes music among volumes while retaining certain metadata, like artwork, play counts, ratings, and playlists.

As usual, please see the version history for details.

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to OmniGrowl to support the new Mac App Store version of Growl, Growl 1.3.

As noted in our last blog posting, when Growl moved to the Mac App Store and became a menu bar application, OmniGrowl had ceased to recognize it as installed. This has now been fixed. Please note that OmniGrowl does require that Growl remain in the default installation location, that is your Applications folder.

As of this release, the Growl team has not yet released its developer toolkit ("SDK"), so this should be considered a provisional fix. After the SDK is released, additional compatibility improvements will follow as needed.

In addition, fixes were made for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Word of the Day notification.

As usual, please refer to the version history for details.

The Growl folks today released a Mac App Store only version of Growl. OmniGrowl 4.4.2 does not recognize this installation.

A fix will be coming relatively soon, but ideally we need to wait for the Growl team to release their toolkit ("SDK") to developers first. If that does not get released in a timely fashion, we will release a provisional fix to be followed by full support for Growl 1.3.

Thanks for your patience, early adopters!

WBC today released another compatibility upgrade for OmniGrowl on OS X Lion.

The main change is that OmniGrowl now runs in 64-bit mode. Support for OS X versions as old as Tiger and for PPC Macs has been retained (for now) as well.

As usual please refer to the version history for details.

WBC today released another compatibility upgrade for OmniGrowl on OS X Lion.

Last August, WBC released the first compatibility upgrade, then we promptly took off on vacation. But wouldn't you know it, some issues remained. We believe these have now all been fixed.

Issues with iTunes notifications and artwork have been fixed. Also, GeekTool integration has been restored with the version of GeekTool available on the Mac App Store.

As usual please refer to the version history for details.

WBC today released a Lion compatibility upgrade for OmniGrowl. Most features had been working normally on Lion, but a few tweaks were needed.

In particular, time out errors related to Address Book dates checking should now be eliminated. It is also now possible to set a hidden preference to turn off the feature to quit after excessive time outs completely, or to increase the number of time outs before OmniGrowl will quit. (This "quit" feature is deliberate: the idea is if for some reason OmniGrowl is repeatedly getting stuck, there's no reason to tie up your system…)

As usual, please see the version history for details.

Note:

Early downloaders of OmniGrowl 4.3.4 with PPC Macs: please re-download the universal binary version. Dropping PPC support may soon come, but not yet! (The universal version was posted at 7 pm EDT on Aug 15.)

Wooden Brain Concepts today released an update to MoveTunes which adds features and improves performance.

MoveTunes now retains artwork when moving music files.

It also includes the option to copy moved tracks to a MoveTunes Moved playlist. This helps if you use smart playlists based on recently added music, because you can now exclude that playlist.

MoveTunes also now includes an option to copy the original track to a MoveTunes Removed playlist. This greatly improves performance, because now MoveTunes does not need to have iTunes remove each move track individually, which takes time with larger libraries. Instead, you can delete all the tracks from that playlist when MoveTunes is done, by selecting them all and then hitting command-option-delete.

This update fixes critical issues and also helps to improve security. It includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code.

We're just joking about that last one. (Version histories for Microsoft Office for some reason say that every time...) But other minor under-the-hood improvements were also made. Please see the version history for details, as usual.

OmniGrowl 4.3.3, released today, adds further improvements to iTunes artwork handling.

First, the feature to add artwork found on the internet to the iTunes album has been fixed. It has been broken since iTunes 10.2.

Second, OmniGrowl will now show separate artwork for each track of an album under specific conditions. Normally, OmniGrowl only checks artwork once per album in order to reduce the drain on iTunes.

OmniGrowl has updated Growl to 1.2.2 under the hood, and now includes the Growl installer, so it can either update Growl or install it when not present.

As usual, please see the version history for details.

The past month have brought some big (little) changes to the home front of Wooden Brain Concepts. A newborn boy is now part of the team!

As a result, some support inquiries have gone unanswered. On top of this, we lost some email during this period due to database corruption.

As we strive to answer support emails in as timely a fashion as possible, we apologize for this.

If you have contacted support during the past month and have not yet received a reply, please send your query again.

Thanks for your understanding.