Blogs

So, as (nearly) every other Mac developer on earth, I installed the final version of Leopard yesterday, upgrading my Tiger installation. Of course, I did a complete backup on my external hard disk with SuperDuper, and like John Gruber I suggest you do the same. Of course, use the tool of your choice to back up your data, but do it. Fortunately, everything went really smooth and an hour or so later, I booted the great new Mac OS X.

1. The dock on the (left) side looks really great. Thank you Apple for doing this last minute change. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

2. The menu is, in my humble opinion, broken. How can anyone think it is a good idea to display text on a transparent background over some other text (or whatever the window below the menu displays)?

3. All this transparency. Oh my. I hope someone will write a tool to disable it really soon. Like today. I'll buy it. Today. I promise one thing: BetterZip will not be transparent. Ever. I really don't think that information is best presented with more information behind and shining through. There is a reason why in the good old days when slideshows where done with projectors and real slides (sheets of transparent plastic) the teacher/presenter removed one slide from the projector before putting the next on. Everyone loves Steve Jobs' clean presentation style and laughs about the overloaded slideshows of Bill Gates, but when it comes to our desktops this style (Zen or 'less is more' - pick your favorite) is forgotten or ignored. It annoys me in the menus, the stacks, the Dock's tooltips, and give me a few more days, I bet I will find more places. Or is it just me? Getting old. Mumbling about good old times. Maybe Steve will actually put each slide of his next keynote speech on top of the previous.

4. The icon of a folder in the dock (I have only my Applications folder there) is not the folder's icon, but some dynamically generated icon with the first document's icon on top. Unfortunately, I have an application with a rather ugly icon (no, I am not going to tell you which one) as the alphabetically first file in the folder. I have now renamed this app, so that it is no longer the first, but that's not what we should do, is it? So, now I have two Addressbook icons in my dock, because Addressbook is now the first icon in my Applications folder. D'oh!

5. The new Finder and Safari look gorgeous. Finally. Thanks again, Apple.

6. Spotlight is so fast now that I have removed QuickSilver which I only used as application launcher. Let's see, if it stays that way. One app less running all the time, consuming my memory. Well, not really my memory, but my Mac's memory.

7. The iCal icon in the dock shows the current day. Hurra! It's little details like this that make me happy.

You can read about all the great new things like time machine, the new functions in Mail, iCal, iChat on the Apple website or on the NY Times website or many other blogs in the Mac community, e.g. The Unoffical Apple Weblog.

As a last note: BetterZip's help is broken in Leopard. It says, it wants to connect to the internet: The CSS stylesheet references missing images, sorry. For now, please use the online documentation, a new version is on the way. If you find any other issues, please let me know. Thanks! I am off, exploring 300+ new features.

I have just released BetterZip 1.5.4 which will run nicely on Leopard, the new Mac OS X 10.5 which Apple will release this Friday.

There are two changes:

• RAR now stores symbolic links as such, which is now consistent with all other archive formats.
• Extracting when the preview drawer is open is much faster now.

And I have fixed a couple of bugs that have been reported:

• SIT: The wrong file size was displayed for files that only consisted of a resource fork.
• Direct extract (holding down the Command key while opening an archive from Finder) crashed for larger archives.
• An error occured when extracting folders with custom icons from tarballs.
• When previewing files in a password protected archive you were asked for the password for every file.
• Fixed the progress indicator for SIT extraction: It was much faster than the actual extraction.
• Folder properties like color labels and icon positions were not saved correctly.

Version 1.5.2 was out in the wild for a mere six hours. Then a concerned user found out that 7-zip handling was completely broken. Sad little version 1.5.2. Fortunately, the bug was really small and the fix needed only a single line of code. And because I have automated my build system completely the new version 1.5.3 was out within half an hour.

The function in version 1.5.2 that identified 002, 003, ... files as parts of a multi-volume archive misidentified 7z files breaking handling of 7-zip files. I am really sorry for the inconvenience of upgrading BetterZip twice in one day!

If BetterZip does something stupid, please let me know. I can only fix problems of which I know. Sometimes it takes a little longer than 30 minutes, e.g., 30 days. Anyway, thanks, concerned user!

This is only a small update with the few bugs fixed that have been reported since the release of the previous version. BetterZip is pretty stable now and with every version fewer bugs get reported while the number of users increases at a steady pace.

Changes

• Added xpi (Firefox extensions) and nth (Nokia theme file) as file extensions for zip archives.
• Files with the extensions 002, 003, ... will be recognized as archives. If you open any file from a multi-volume archive, BetterZip will automatically try to open the first file from the series instead.
• Speed enhancement: The file browser is only populated when the drawer is open.

Bugs fixed

• When extracting single files from a tarball the resource fork was not always restored correctly. There was no problem, if you extracted all files.
• Extracting Mac OS 9 files from zip archives did sometimes work incorrectly.
• The sizes of files larger than 4GB were incorrectly displayed for RAR archives.
• Some SIT files were only partially extractable. This should be fixed now. If you encounter SIT files which BetterZip does not handle correctly, please let me know.

I will now lock myself up in front of my screen and finish the AppleScript support I have started long ago, but never completely polished enough to release it to the public.

Remember the Pan-Mass Challenge? The PMC is a 192-mile bike ride across Massachusetts. They raise money for cancer research and treatment, for the Jimmy Fund at Dana-Farber. Approximately 4,500 riders and 2,500 support volunteers participate.

As part of this event Seth Dillingham auctions off great Mac software including BetterZip. As Seth has almost reached his goal to raise $6600, the auctions will soon end. You better hurry and make him an offer for a bundle of software which contains titles of your choice.

Update: It's over. Seth reached his goal and collected nearly $7000. You can still donate money for the good cause. Great work, Seth!