Wooden Brain Concepts

Update Hat-Trick: DevonSync, OmniGrowl, iDupe

2010-07-20T13:24:00.000-04:00

Releases for three WBC products are now available.

A long-overdue update for DevonSync (1.4) verifies Snow Leopard compatibility, adds the ability to select particular DEVONthink databases, and introduces other minor features and fixes.

OmniGrowl 4.0.3 improves notifications for network status changes such as dropped connections and fixes MacZot formatting.

iDupe 2.8.3 restores compatibility with Tiger Intel systems.

OmniGrowl 4.0.2 released

2010-05-14T14:52:00.000-04:00

OmniGrowl 4.0.2 has just been released. This is mainly a maintenance release.

It fixes a bug that prevented validating the Yahoo Upcoming API key on 10.5 intel machines and possibly other system configurations. (Version 4.0 did not have this bug on most configurations.)

OmniGrowl is now 64-bit compatible. Macs that are 64-bit capable now require OS X 10.5 or higher. However OmniGrowl remains compatible with Tiger on older Macs.

If using GeekTool integration, a redundant geeklet refresh (which generated excess system logging) has been eliminated. This requires GeekTool 3.0 final.

Please see the version history.

OmniGrowl 4 is here! Hold on to your socks!

2010-05-06T16:32:00.000-04:00

After weeks of dedicated work, OmniGrowl 4.0 is finally here! We're really excited about this release and hope you will find out why.

It adds so many new features and enhancements that we can only highlight a few major ones:

Local event notifications powered by Yahoo Upcoming
OmniGrowl can run optionally as a normal application in the dock with menus
Easily show iTunes artwork on the desktop with integrated GeekTool support
Integrated music controls to add found artwork to iTunes
Revamped concert notifications with images
4info searches can search by set, and each search term can have a custom image
More images overall
Auto-fill presets for twitter, Netflix, and facebook

Please note that OmniGrowl 4 is a $6 paid update if you bought it before January 1, 2010.

How OmniGrowl can help you improve your iTunes artwork

2010-04-13T08:59:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wanted to improve your iTunes album artwork, but haven't wanted to spend hours (or days depending on the size of your collection) working on it in a dedicated way?

Have you wanted to see album cover artwork while listening to iTunes without disrupting your normal workflow by switching to iTunes or even having the iTunes window take up any space?

Then you may be interested in taking just a little time to set up OmniGrowl and GeekTool 3 and some hot keys for scripts included with OmniGrowl.

OmniGrowl 4 significantly improves the tools that make this possible. Imagine this workflow:

Album artwork is displayed on your desktop. An unobtrusive character in the track info indicates whether the artwork was downloaded from the internet or is already in iTunes. You can glance at it, and if it came from the internet, with a key press you can add that artwork to the album currently playing. You continue your work, enjoying your music, and over time improve the artwork in your collection.

This works especially nicely if you have a secondary monitor, so you can see the album art without losing screen real estate for it.

Although setting this up takes a little time, it's very easy to do. Basically you have to:

• install GeekTool 3
• create 2 "geeklets": an image geeklet called "itunes art" and a shell geeklet called "itunes info"
• enable GeekTool support in OmniGrowl
• optional: install your choice of several hot keys programs and attach a few scripts to hot keys
• run OmniGrowl as usual and enjoy!

Please read OmniGrowl as an iTunes artwork suite for more information.

Note: As OmniGrowl 4 makes this even easier than before, this blog entry has been updated on May 5, 2010 in anticipation of the release of OmnIGrowl 4.0.

OmniGrowl 3.9 released, focusing on iTunes artwork

2010-04-12T12:38:00.000-04:00

OmniGrowl 3.9 has been released. Changes focus on iTunes artwork. Better quality images are downloaded from discogs. Additions and improvements to Immediate Actions and plugins and other tweaks make Omnigrowl play even nicer with GeekTool 3. With some set-up, the changes make OmniGrowl a more useful tool to relatively passively set missing artwork in iTunes. In addition, the documentation has been revised and reorganized, and moved entirely online. As always, please see the version history for details.

Update Hat-Trick: iDupe, Omnigrowl, and Cast Away

2010-03-27T13:51:00.000-04:00

This weekend, WBC released updates to three of our products:

iDupe has been updated to version 2.8.2. The update focuses on special handling for lossless media files and improved fuzzy matching.

OmniGrowl has been updated to version 3.8.2. This update validated the RSS presets and fixed any outdated ones. It also adds the ability to turn off power status checking.

Cast Away has been updated to version 2.9.5. It focuses mainly on bug fixes and improving troubleshooting.

Please see each of the linked version history pages for more details.

Holidays

2010-02-25T23:26:00.000-05:00

We will be on holiday from February 26 through March 7. Answers to support emails will likely be delayed during this period. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

OmniGrowl 3.8 released

2010-02-14T08:43:00.000-05:00

OmniGrowl 3.8 focuses on updates to Yahoo Weather, and adds a couple other new features. Please see the version history for details.

CaliBrate 1.7.4 released

2010-02-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

CaliBrate 1.7.4 adds features related to multiple alarms. You can now search for events with at least X alarms, either all alarms or particular types of alarms. When adding alarms, it is now optional whether or not to clear alarms of the same type first. The event drawer now provides better status information on the number of alarms for an event. Please see the version history for details.

OmniGrowl 3.7.2 released

2009-12-30T07:52:00.000-05:00

OmniGrowl 3.7.2 has been released. It fixes a bug that caused birthdays around or just after New Year's to notify on the wrong days.

WBC iTunes Scripts Collection 1.8.4 released, adds Snow Leopard Services

2009-12-28T18:53:00.000-05:00

The WBC iTunes Scripts Collection has been updated to version 1.8.4.

Although it's been hard to keep every script in the collection 100% up-to-date, one thing that's been missing since Snow Leopard has been the functionality of the old Big Cat scripts. Big Cat doesn't really work with the Finder anymore, because of the new way Services are handled. So all of the old Big Cat scripts have been reworked as Snow Leopard Services. A few other minor updates (AMG Info, iPod Playlist Catalog) have also been made.

Full release notes in the distribution read me.

If you have ever used or had an interest in the Geek Tool script, I strongly recommend using OmniGrowl with GeekTool 3 instead.

Attach a contact to the selected event in iCal (new script)

2009-12-28T18:51:00.000-05:00

Ever want to attach a contact to an event, but not set that contact as an attendee? Here's a new script that will put a selected or chosen Address Book contact into the URL field of the selected event in iCal. This will create a link in the event which will display as "Show in Address Book..."

Cast Away 2.9.4 released

2009-12-07T13:07:00.000-05:00

Cast Away 2.9.4 may fix a rare issue where the removal script fails to read settings from the main application. Update is only necessary from 2.9.3 if you are experiencing this issue. Please see version history.

iDupe 2.8 released, fixes issues with tracks lacking tags

2009-11-11T01:01:00.000-05:00

iDupe 2.8 focuses on fixing a number of issues related to tracks missing ID3 tags. With some good reports and sleuthing from users, we were able to nail down and fix some specific problems. Please see the version history for details.

Cast Away 2.9.3 released

2009-11-11T00:56:00.000-05:00

Cast Away 2.9.3 has been released. It fixes a rare undefined variable "naerr" bug. Feature requests to come in next release.

Cast Away 2.9.2 released

2009-10-24T10:54:00.000-04:00

Cast Away 2.9.2 has been released. It fixes a rare issue which caused Cast Away to always abort a removal when it starts. Please see the version history for details.

CaliBrate 1.7.3 released

2009-09-28T03:32:00.000-04:00

CaliBrate 1.7.3 fixes a single bug that would cause searching for annual all-day duplicates to fail with an unknown error. Please see the version history.

OmniGrowl 3.7 and GeekTool 3: A clarification

2009-09-23T16:11:00.008-04:00

One reader posted a negative comment on OmniGrowl's page on versiontracker, the gist of which was that he was upset that OmniGrowl seemed (in the release notes) to be making an "ill-advised jab at GeekTool" and was claiming to replace it.

Since we agree that the release notes could have been more clear, here is our reply to that comment:

We love GeekTool and have been using it for years. We love GeekTool 3 even more. The "better solution" we're talking about is specifically how to display iTunes track info and artwork on the desktop using GeekTool. We wrote one of those ourselves a long time ago and published it in WBC iTunes Scripts Collection. Similar solutions have been posted on several blogs, MacOSXHints, etc. The existing solutions have 3 limitations:

They all involve running 2 separate scripts (one for artwork and one for track info), and polling iTunes on a regular basis (several times a minute). This puts a huge tax on iTunes and eventually, in our opinion, makes iTunes unusable and therefore makes this kind of solution not really work.
The track info and the artwork is usually out-of-sync.
You have to have embedded artwork.

So, what we mean by OmniGrowl being a "much better solution for GeekTool users than anything currently available" is that it handles things differently:

OmniGrowl uses the distributed notifications system to be alerted of iTunes track changes, and doesn't need to constantly poll iTunes.
one plugin updates GeekTool at the same time, and uses the new AppleScript support in GeekTool to tell it when to refresh.
if you have the option to download artwork from the internet on (or even if you don't and OmniGrowl is getting the artwork from iTunes), then OmniGrowl is already caching an image file, so there is no duplication of this task on iTunes or the system.*

Beyond that it is really easy to set up. Just rename a provided template and then create two new geeklets in GeekTool with specific names. So as a GeekTool user too, please just try it and then comment back what you think! Thanks. (Viva GeekTool)

* For the even more technically inclined, I would add to the comment as posted on VersionTracker by saying that also, OmniGrowl will only cache artwork once per album rather than constantly copying a cache file over another cache file. Also OmniGrowl has an embedded transparent png file in the application bundle, so there's no need to copy that around the system either.

OmniGrowl 3.7 released

2009-09-23T11:28:00.000-04:00

OmniGrowl 3.7 has been released. This is a big update focused on iTunes artwork support. OmniGrowl now downloads album artwork from the internet, so even if the show full iTunes notification is not selected (which is less burdensome on iTunes), you can still see artwork in the notification. Related plugins & additions have been included. Most notably is a script to add the downloaded artwork to the album in iTunes, and a plugin template for GeekTool 3 which allows you to show the artwork and track info on your desktop with some minimal configuration of GeekTool. Please see the version history for details.

CaliBrate 1.7.2 released

2009-09-19T10:47:00.000-04:00

CaliBrate 1.7.2 has been released. It addresses a specific need: to deal with a certain type of event corruption on Snow Leopard. Please see version history for details.

Issues with Tiger Intel

2009-09-15T06:11:00.002-04:00

As I blogged yesterday, the Apple developer tools on Snow Leopard have some major bugs which make compiling for backwards compatibility very difficult or impossible. We knew that there were issues with iDupe 2.6 on intel macs running Leopard specifically. We managed to work around these bugs to create iDupe 2.7 which does work on intel macs on Leopard (as well as tested successfully on 10.6.1, 10.5.8 PPC & Intel, and 10.4.11 PPC). However, we now have one report that iDupe 2.7 won't launch on 10.4.11 intel. Unfortunately, as we don't have this configuration to test, there's not much we can do to work around the problem without Apple addressing it. So, if you find any of the WBC don't work on your platform, we urge you to report it. In the meantime, it is very likely that an older build will work just fine. Although we continue to add features to our products, the last round of updates did focus on compatibility upgrades for Snow Leopard, so if you're not on Snow Leopard yet, the older versions should still suit your needs. Thanks.

iDupe 2.7 released

2009-09-14T12:33:00.000-04:00

iDupe 2.7 has been released. It focuses on supporting iTunes 9, and fixing some major compiler bugs that affected particular systems, mainly intel Macs running Leopard (OS X 10.5). If your system was affected, you would have seen -3 code errors after scanning. iDupe 2.7 is a major under-the-hood update to support as many systems as possible. There are two positive side-effects of the changes: 1) Since use of the Finder is greatly reduced, iDupe will likely perform faster, and 2) iDupe may now work on FileVault systems and certain network-based volumes where it did not before, but this is yet untested. Your feedback will be helpful as it is not possible for WBC to test these configurations. Please see version history for details.

Cast Away 2.9 released

2009-09-14T12:16:00.000-04:00

Cast Away 2.9 has been released. It's a major under-the-hood Snow Leopard update, and also adds support for iTunes 9. iTunes U media can be treated like Podcasts. It's now quite a bit faster as it has dropped the old methods to get the release date needed before iTunes 8.1 (and now requires at least iTunes 8.1). There is a new feature to add comments to the playing track. Please see the version history for details. The price has shot up from $7 to $8. Your support is appreciated.

OmniGrowl 3.6.3 released

2009-09-14T12:12:00.000-04:00

OmniGrowl 3.6.3 has been released. It focuses on some of the advanced features such as plugins and logs. Please see the version history for details.

CaliBrate 1.7 released

2009-09-14T12:01:00.000-04:00

CaliBrate 1.7 has been released. It's another big update that fixes bugs and adds several user feature requests. Please see the version history for details.