Noodlings

It’s been a bit hectic because of the launch yesterday but I finally have a moment to post. Yes, Hazel 4 is finally out. You can find the release notes here.

Development was a bit rocky. I played with a bunch of different features but some of them didn’t quite pan out in a way that I liked. It felt like wasted effort in that that work didn’t result in a usable feature but many of them were only shelved temporarily. Oftentimes I end up having that eureka moment which would allow a shelved feature to be finally realized so something to look out for in future point releases.

That said, I’m happy with the features that I did get to work. They seem simple on paper but involved a bit more thought than would be expected. Sync is always tricky and getting the preview feature down to something as simple as it is now took a little doing.

Along with that was the site re-design (courtesy of the folks at Brotherhood). The previous site was mostly static. Adding content involved editing raw html pages and adding them. It was enough to discourage me from doing it often and discourage me it did, as I ended up leaving the site very outdated. The new site is backed by WordPress which will hopefully remedy that. The point here being that content can be added more easily using tools like MarsEdit or WPs web editor. I’ve already added a few posts (a review and a couple of knowledge base articles) since the launch.

Also, the new site design is a bit more stripped down and streamlined. I’ve tried to reduce navigation in favor of search. Most of the site is searchable via the form on the support page so I recommend going there first and doing a search if you ever have a question about Hazel.

The launch itself went relatively smoothly (except one incident – more details below). I can credit most of this to using a VPS (virtual private server). VPSes are great as you can clone, rebuild and resize them as needed. It gives you an amazing amount of agility when deploying servers.

Before the launch, I set up a clone server so I could set up and test the new site. Since it’s a clone, no need to reinstall and reconfigure everything (though you do have to make some changes in places where the IP address or hostname is stored). You end up with pretty much an identical server to play with which went a long way towards making sure things were working properly.

When I launched, I transferred the new stuff over to the live server. That part went with little drama but then disaster happened: I underestimated the load from tons of eager customers. The problem was that I had sent two email campaigns. One to those on my mailing list and another to those who purchased recently. The latter group received a message with instructions on how to get their free upgrade license. And guess what all those people decided to do immediately upon seeing that.

The result was that the site got slammed. More specifically, apache was overloaded. Enter VPS awesomeness #2: I was able to resize the server on the fly. It took a little while (maybe 15 minutes though it felt much longer) but the old server was still able to run, albeit very sluggishly, until the last minute when the conversion finished and it rebooted. After that, the site ran like butter and it was smooth sailing (at least as far as the server went).

Aside from some minor glitches (version 4.0.1 released this morning should address some of them), the launch has been pretty great. I just had the best day in sales in Hazel’s history so I’m pretty happy about that. My thanks to everyone who contributed, including Brotherhood, Jono Hunt for his icon and UI work, my beta testers, my friends in the Mac dev community and of course, all my customers who’ve been very supportive of Hazel all these years.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the Twitter feed or the forums, Apple introduced a glaring bug in Gatekeeper in 10.11.4. Any non-app bundles (that includes preference panes, screensavers, plugins, etc.) are rejected by Gatekeeper regardless of whether they are signed or not. For those of us that ship such bundles, this is what I’d consider a big deal.

The workaround itself isn’t so bad: either right-click and select “Open” or drag the pref pane into System Preferences. For users curious enough to email support, it’s not such a bad thing as I can suggest one of the workarounds. The problem it gives new users installing it for the first time a bad impression of the software, not realizing that it’s actually Apple’s fault. I can’t really measure this type of thing but I think it’s safe to say a good number of them just nope out of there without contacting me. The result is that my software has an association with being untrusted.

Daniel Jalkut gives a more detailed account of the mechanics of it here so I won’t go retread that ground.

After filing a DTS incident, Apple confirmed it as a bug (I’ve filed rdar://25466753). There was no information about when a fix would be made available and given that Apple is not known for being nimble about these things and that I was losing customers, I followed the advice of some colleagues and took matters into my own hands.

The result is that starting with Hazel 3.3.8, it will ship with an installer app. The installer app still goes through System Preferences as I still think that its installation process works well. Note that an installer package was also an option but I couldn’t figure out if/how to make it use a previous install location if the software was already installed (If anyone knows, I’d be happy to hear about it just in case I have to resort to it in the future). Hopefully now I can direct my efforts back to getting Hazel 4 shipped.

One can debate how much Apple cares about non-app-bundled software but when the workaround is to suggest people bypass Gatekeeper, they should be very concerned. False positives only erode the confidence people have in your security systems and you don’t want them to get in the habit of casually bypassing them.

For those who haven’t updated to El Cap yet or don’t follow the Twitter feed, yes, Hazel runs great on El Capitan (OS X 10.11). There are no known significant issues or bugs at this point and the current version runs fine as is. The only problem that I’ve found so far is an obscure and extremely minor UI feature. I will be issuing a patch at some point but there is no hurry on that front as I’d rather wait for some real El Cap bugs to surface.

If you do find problems, please report them to me. You can (in decreasing order of effectiveness) email support, post in the forums, or tweet. Those are the places I check and can confirm and fix the bugs I see there. I won’t see posts on other sites so please consider posting to one of the above places first. Whatever you do, please do not give credence to random statements about compatibility on other sites, especially when those statements were made months ago on an early beta of El Cap, and even more especially on a site with “rumors” in the name. I’ve received enough emails referencing such posts that I feel the need to weed those out specifically. Remember, this is the internet so choose your sources carefully.

In the meantime, work is continuing on version 4. I can’t say when it will happen but I will be doing a beta at some point so keep an eye on the aforementioned official channels for updates.

Hazel 3.3 is finally here. It has a bunch of neat additions that I think experienced users will find handy (in particular, all the things you can do with custom attributes now). I won’t list all the features here but check out the release notes if you want to learn more. Also, while 3.2.7 for the most part works fine on Yosemite, this version fixes all those pesky cosmetic issues, including the dark mode menubar icon which a lot of people seem to be fixated on. I think this is a great release as it ties up a bunch of loose ends and really opens Hazel up to workflows that weren’t able to be accomplished before without the aid of custom scripts. Speaking of which, Yosemite introduced JavaScript  alongside AppleScript as a way to automate apps, so JavaScript is now an option in Hazel as well. So for those of you who find AppleScript unpalatable, now you have an alternative.

While I will continue to do maintenance releases, my thinking at this point is that 3.3 will be the last of the version 3 series as I start shifting into thinking about version 4. I think version 3 has had a phenomenal run and I hope to make version 4 a worthwhile upgrade. It’ll be a while so for those fearing version 4 around the corner, you should’t worry. I’d be quite surprised if I get it out before the end of 2015.

Many thanks to all the testers who banged on 3.3 during its beta. Got a lot of great bug reports including some at the last minute which helped to make Hazel not explode (at least not yet – if yours does, blame it on tester #347).

Enjoy.

Just found out this weekend, somewhat belatedly, that my talk at NSConference 6, “Life Outside the Mac App Store”, is available on Vimeo. I don’t have the nerve to watch it myself but given recent events, you might find it interesting.

It’s nice to see Hazel in books. Even in digital form, the book format gives me more of a sense of permanency than say articles on some site. So, when I see Hazel mentioned in a book, I can’t help but think of Hazel as being a more permanent fixture in people’s computing lives. The most recent entry is Joe Kissel’s book “Take Control of Automating Your Mac” which has a little section talking about Hazel. While most readers of this blog are already familiar with Hazel and Mac automation in general, this book is a great introduction for the novice in your life who is ready to delve deeper into their Mac. It also contains coupons for many of the apps mentioned in the book.

And on the topic of Hazel in books, I’m way overdue in mentioning “Mac At Work” by David Sparks. This came out a while back but is a great intro to using your Mac in a work environment. Also, it’s available as a physical book, which is always useful for propping up an uneven couch leg (after you’ve read it, of course).

I’m still waiting for Hazel to be incorporated into some work of fiction. Too bad Stieg Larsson isn’t around anymore as he had a tendency to go into way too much detail about characters’ computer configurations.

Apple just released Mavericks yesterday so I’ve released version 3.2 which specifically supports the new tagging feature. You can now create conditions based on a file’s tags and add/set tags via a new action. I’ve done a fairly faithful reproduction of Mavericks tagging UI so it should be a seamless experience.

Like Apple, I’m taking a more conservative approach to tag support as it’s still unclear how people are going to use the feature. One particular feature: the ability to create dynamic tags (i.e. not hardcoded into the rule) is definitely being considered. I’m sure many of you want this feature so here’s the deal: tell me how exactly you would use it. It’s not a question of “why” but of “how” so concrete examples will go a long way into determining how this feature will be fleshed out.

There are fixes in this release as well so even if you aren’t on Mavericks yet (though being free, what are you waiting for?), you should update. Many thanks to the people who beta tested. The beta version should update to the final release but if you run into any problems, contact me.

In Hazel 3.1, I added the ability to upload files. Underneath the hood, I used ConnectionKit 2 to do the heavy lifting. It has an API similar to NSFileManager, making it very easy to add FTP, SFTP and WebDAV support without having to deal with the pesky details of those protocols. There were other factors on why I chose it, such as the fact that not only is it actively developed, but done so by people who use it in their own shipping commercial products. And it didn’t hurt that it’s maintained by my friends at Karelia.

If you have used this feature in Hazel, you would have encountered this interface:

It should look a bit familiar. It’s a homegrown, from scratch, implementation of NSOpenPanel made to work on top of ConnectionKit. I felt it important to provide a familiar interface instead of coming up with something new in this case. I did a bit of work to make sure it operated as closely to NSOpenPanel as was reasonable. It has multiple view types (icon, list, and column) and most of the controls you’d expect.

Of course, browsing a filesystem via various network protocols is a different beast so some things had to be done differently. The main thing is that the UI is asynchronous from the network stuff so no beachballing while waiting for responses from the server. The UI should be responsive at all times, even allowing you to cancel the panel at any point. In the upper right, there’s a reload button that changes to a progress indicator to indicate activity and you will see a loading message when trying to fetch the contents of directories that haven’t been loaded yet.

Visually, the biggest difference is the header up top noting which server is being browsed. Also, the sidebar is missing. There aren’t many standard locations that can be put there and I felt that favorite URLs should be managed elsewhere as it didn’t seem likely that users would want to hop from server to server by clicking different entries in the sidebar. The one common directory that I could think of was the home directory and so instead, I gave that its own button (note that not all servers/protocols have such a concept of a home directory and it also depends on what URL you use to connect to the server so YMMV).

Another omission is the search field. Since there’s no notion of Spotlight in any of these protocols, doing an exhaustive search of the remote filesystem would be resource intensive and not very friendly to the servers involved. While I may consider adding it back in to search the current directory, you can get much of the same effect by just typing out the name of the file. Just as in NSOpenPanel, it will end up selecting the entry starting with those characters. I also dropped the Arrange button and the Coverflow view, mainly because I didn’t think people actually used those things. Especially for Coverflow, it wouldn’t be particularly useful since we can’t get file previews without downloading the whole files themselves.

But besides all of that, I think you’ll find it to be a pretty decent facsimile of NSOpenPanel. You might be surprised by how much of NSOpenPanel’s behavior is replicated here, including some features many people don’t know that NSOpenPanel has.

And the resemblance is more than skin deep. CK2OpenPanel (the name of the NSOpenPanel implementation) has a nearly identical API to that of NSOpenPanel. It’s a mostly drop-in replacement for NSOpenPanel so programming to its API should be just as familiar. Why would you care? Well, you should care because I’ve contributed the code for CK2OpenPanel to be included in ConnectionKit. You can see all the code, warts and all. Play around with it. Use it in your own projects. Print it out and wallpaper your home with it. I felt it was the least I could do for all the work that’s been done on the backend. Also, I thought it would be nice if people adopted it so that there was a standard UI for this type of thing.

You can find everything on the ConnectionKit GitHub page. In particular, you want to check out the v2.x-beta branch. Note that there are separate targets/frameworks in the project for the back end (ConnectionKit) and front end (ConnectionKitUI), with the latter dependent on the former. Make sure to check out the README as it should answer a lot of your questions. And if you are interested in contributing to ConnectionKit, please do as there are a bunch of things that need work. S3 support would be nice, for instance.

Last but not least, a big thanks to Mike Abdullah at Karelia for working with me to provide the backend support for this. Rest assured that he will be receiving beers from me at the next conference we both attend.

Enjoy.

Fresh from the Noodlesoft Danger Labs is Hazel 3.1 with a bunch of spiffy new things. The two main features this time around are file uploading and matching against file contents. If you don’t use Hazel, maybe these sound a bit abstract to you but for people that use it, it fills a couple big holes in their workflows.

But instead of elaborating on these myself, I’ve been fortunate to have a couple users do the work for me. Demonstrating use of the new file upload facility, Sid O’Neill shows his workflow for resizing and uploading images to his server. 

Next up is David Sparks (MacSparky and MacPowerUsers Podcast) showing how to match and extract dates out of your files and use them for renaming. Includes a great video so definitely check it out.

Of course, there are a bunch of other things in this release. You can find the full list here.

The response from customers have been great. I’ve gotten a lot of wonderful emails from people so far which has solidified my dedication to the product even more. As mentioned in my last post, I will be looking into Mavericks support, with a particular interest in its tagging feature, in a future release.

Also, in regards to the new upload feature, watch this space in the coming weeks as I’ll have something for you developers.

If you don’t follow the Twitter feed or forums, then you may not know that Hazel 3.1 is currently in beta and will be released soon(ish). Normally, I’d just announce it when released but this time around there are a few things you should know in preparation.

It will require OS X 10.7 (Lion)

I announced this in the forums last fall. It was a hard decision to make but given the data, it made sense to drop 10.6 support. Note that Hazel 3.0.18 will still continue to run on 10.6.

It will be a free upgrade

Being a non-major release, this update will be free to version 3 license holders.

When 3.1 is released, Hazel’s price will go up

Final price has yet to be determined. If you are considering buying Hazel, you should do so before 3.1 ships as you’ll get it at the lower price now with a free upgrade to 3.1 later.

And about Mavericks…

Apple just announced and seeded it to developers so, Hazel 3.1 won’t have specific support for it. As with every other OS release, I will be adding support for Mavericks in a future release. I usually don’t try and do compatibility fixes this early on since many of the issues end up being on Apple’s end so I like to wait until the seeds stabilize a bit before hunkering down.

And as for that tagging thing, I’m just as excited about it as you are so, trust me, I’m looking into it.