I’ve been quiet for a while – a lot has been going on both within St. Clair Software and around it. For starters, we’ve had a number of updates:
App Tamer is up to version 1.1.1 now, addressing compatibility with Alien Skin’s Photoshop plug-ins as well as improving on App Tamer’s own miserly CPU usage. There was one problem in particular that was interesting: When people update to Lion, there are often background or helper applications that are no longer configured correctly (components installed in /System or /Library are missing, for instance). This can result in startup applications launching over and over again. As a user, you often never see this, but if you look in your Console log, there are heaps of messages documenting it. Because App Tamer does some work each time an application launches, customers were complaining that it was using lots of CPU time – an investigation turned up this repeated-launching problem on their machines. App Tamer has now been tweaked to minimize the impact on CPU usage, but the solution is really to fix whatever’s broken on your system.
Jettison was updated to version 1.1 in the Mac App Store, giving you the option to hide its menubar icon and working around a bug in Lion (a bug in OS X, not Jettison) that delayed Jettison’s “it’s ok to unplug” beep sound until the Mac woke back up from sleep. Which, yeah, made the beep totally useless…
Finally, there have been some compatibility issues with Default Folder X, the worst of which actually caused some applications to crash. Versions 4.4.4, 4.4.5 and 4.4.6 addressed various problems that resulted from architectural changes in Lion and the corresponding adaptations in Default Folder X. So things are once again right in the Default Folder X world. The latest beta (more on that in the next post) closes the last issue that I’m aware of.
