What is Wooden Brain Concepts?
WBC has been around since 2005, going on a quarter century!
We focus on simple yet powerful single-purpose MacOS applications, which were all first created to meet our own needs.
We had been on hiatus for many years and are rising from the ashes to release a new product called gr∞ves into the wild.
Legacy Products
OmniGrowl
You know all those notifications you get on your Mac and your phone? So many that we now need a whole mess of notification settings? Our bad.
We believe OmniGrowl was the first in the world on any platform to offer passive notifications for practical things, things we take for granted today like calendar events, weather, and upcoming concerts and local events.
Prior to OmniGrowl, such passive notifications were mainly used to notify you that a background task (such as ripping a CD) was complete. Growl was a framework for displaying such passive notifications. We supplied the useful content.
iDupe
iDupe was another first of its kind, and our first title. It fulfilled a need at a time when music fans were importing their own CDs and collecting music from sources like Napster, often ending up with duplicates of tracks or albums at different bitrates or with slightly different track info.
Using fuzzy logic, iDupe identified duplicate file tracks in iTunes and removed them. Imitators followed.
CaliBrate
CaliBrate batched processed Calendar (originally iCal) events. With flexible search criteria, it allowed you to select a group of similar events and perform such actions as moving them all to a different relative date or a different calendar, removing duplicates, setting or clearing alarms, attendees, and recurrences, and more.
It also introduced a feature to create events based on natural language such as "lunch at noon tomorrow with Judy." Today that's baked into Calendar and we take it for granted. In that respect, CaliBrate, like OmniGrowl and indeed Growl itself, got Sherlocked.
Of all our sunsetted titles, CaliBrate is the one that is most begging for a ground-up rewrite.
Cast Away
Cast Away filled a huge gap in how iTunes originally handled podcasts. At the time, iTunes download all the podcast episodes you subscribed to without any further management functions. They'd stay in your library and took up limited drive space, until you manually deleted them.
Cast Away automatically removed podcasts you'd listened to after a specified period of time, optionally archiving them. It allowed for granular, global, and per-podcast control of all kinds of removal criteria including overrides for favorites, size caps, and more.