Filling The Gaps

When Leopard was released over a month ago, I proudly announced that Red Sweater’s applications were Leopard ready. Well, it was true, but as I suspect is the case for most software developers, little wrinkles in behavior have slowly shown up as more and more users upgrade to the latest cat.

Today I released two updates to applications that get a bit less attention, but which nonetheless have passionate fans: FastScripts and Clarion. It was thanks to these fans that I discovered and was able to fix a few Leopard-specific issues that they noticed.

FastScripts had a problem with running automator routines. Like, at all. I guess that shows how often I run automator routines myself! From a developer perspective, running Automator Workflows in Leopard is a lot easier than it was in Tiger, and is officially supported by a new AMWorkflow class for Cocoa programmers. Unfortunately, while providing a new and sanctioned method for running these workflows, they simultaneously broke the old technique that I was using for Tiger. Fixed in FastScripts 2.3.6!

Another issue with FastScripts had to do with the order of presentation for the user’s “personal scripts” compared with Apple’s standard scripts (from /Library/Scripts). It’s only natural that users would prefer to see their own scripts appear higher in the menu, since those are probably the ones they’re accessing more frequently. Well, it turns out the placement of these items has just sort of magically fallen the “desired” way for the past 3 major operating system releases. In Leopard, the order of the randomness flip-flopped, and I needed to explicitly ensure that the user’s scripts take priority. Also fixed in FastScripts 2.3.6!

Clarion is an application for studying and drilling yourself on musical interval recognition. It’s a pretty niche market, but it has a pretty nifty live piano keyboard view that I’m pretty proud of. While you’re contemplating the sounds of the pitches you are being quizzed on, you can tinker around on the piano keyboard to give yourself visual and audio clues as to what the interval might be. Unfortunately, some changes in CoreAudio on Leopard revealed a bug in my code for playing these notes. The end result? On Leopard any key you pressed would keep playing the sound even after you release the key. Nightmare! Fixed in Clarion 2.0.1.

If you’re running Leopard and noticing any glitches in my products, please let me know so I can get to the bottom of them. Right now I have only one outstanding issue, which is a text-rendering problem in MarsEdit, when opening existing posts for editing. Unfortunately I can’t find anything wrong with my behavior, so I’m also sort of quietly hoping for a fix from Apple in 10.5.2.