Yasu 2.5.5 Public Beta Released
Okay, so it’s been a little quiet on the ranch lately. There’s been lots of stuff going on with the day job (an awesome change of positions), band (gigs galore, personnel changes) and family (very important stuff, that). Besides, there’s just been nothing worth saying on the Apple front since it’s all about the iPhone anymore (I’m a Blackberry user myself).
Anyway… Here’s some good news for those who’ve been having troubles with Yasu. A new public beta (2.5.5 v285) is available for download here (and on the Yasu page itself).
This version addresses the following:
The French localization was totally borked somehow (for the last few releases). It’s fixed now and should work properly.
The finish “ping” sound was extremely distorted on some machines (Intel only?) when it played. Changed the format from .wav to .aiff. It seems to play much better — at least on my MacBook Pro.
Speaking of the ping — I’ve turned it off by default. It can be enabled manually by launching the Terminal.app and typing
defaults write com.jimmitchelldesign.yasu PlaySound -int 1at the prompt, and it can be turned back off by replacing the “1″ (one) with a “0″ (zero). This will be a preference in v3 (yes, there will be a version 3 eventually).Added some extra Leopard specific cache cleaning paths, also known as the “Darwin” paths, for Safari as well as the other major Apple apps (thanks to Artie Hall for pointing this one out).
And this is a big one. I’ve changed the long running processes back to running inside of shell scripts, rather than trying to be clever and run them in spawned NSTask processes. Some of you are saying “What the heck is that supposed to mean?” Basically, it means that if you click out of the Yasu window when it starts, for instance, the Repair Permissions step, you won’t be able to click back into the window until it moves to the next routine. I have a sneaking hunch this has something to do with the sporadic keychain corruption issues — since it never happened until v2 when I introduced this “feature”. Yes, it’s an inconvenience, but it’s just something we’ll all have to live with.
So give it a try if you’re a daring soul. Remember - it’s a public beta release. There could be issues lurking. It shouldn’t be used in a mission critical setting. Oh, and please - don’t do me the favor of announcing the public beta on VersionTracker or MacUpdate. That will only steal the thunder when I release it for real sometime next week. Thanks.
As always, huge thanks go out to everyone who’ve been supportive and donated over the past few months while my life has been crazy as all heck and I’ve not been able to provide the type of support I’d like to give. We’ll see if we can fix that moving forward.
Yasu v2.5.4 Released
Yasu v2.5.4 has been released to the public. Head on over to the Yasu page to get yours. Be sure to check out the release notes to see what’s changed too.
This release fixes the following since the last stable release of 2.5.2:
- Update reset launch services option for Leopard.
- Added/changed many cache paths that were Tiger/Leopard specific.
- Locks all keychains before a restart/shutdown to prevent corruption.
- Other code optimizations.
Rebuilding the Apple Mail Envelope Index
Some time ago, I had set up my Gmail account in Apple Mail in order to copy over messages that were missing in my online jimmitchell.org IMAP account. I’m one of those guys who likes to have everything all in one place at my finger tips when I want it.
After copying over the messages I wanted, I completely removed the Gmail IMAP account from Mail and when about my business. Soon after, when I went searching for a specific email, I experienced the phenomenon of ghost emails in the search results (see image below). These are messages that Mail once new about, but no longer know where they exist. The ghost emails were all from the since removed Gmail account.
If you’re experiencing the same problem, here’s a very simple fix for it. First, quit Apple Mail if it’s running, then navigate your way to “~/Library/Mail/” (where “~” is your home folder) in the Finder. Once you’re in the Mail folder, you’ll see a file named “Envelope Index” which keeps track of where all messages are located. Rename “Envelope Index” to “Envelope Index Backup” (We don’t want to trash the file just yet).
Then, relaunch Apple Mail. You’ll be presented with a daunting “Message Import” dialog that looks like your email account was wiped out and you’re starting all over. Fear not. You’re simply rebuilding the Envelope Index at this point.
Click “Continue” to rebuild the index. Once it’s done, all those pesky phantom messages will be gone the next time you perform a search in Mail (Yay!). You can then go back to the “~/Library/Mail/” folder in the Finder and move the file you renamed to “Envelope Index Backup” to the Trash.
And there you have it. A very simple solution to a problem that has baffled some of the best Mac users.
Abrupt Logout in Leopard 10.5.2
Okay this so totally sucks that I have to let the world know about it!
While in the middle of my work, Leopard 10.5.2 just logged me out on its own without any kind of warning. It didn’t let me save any open documents or anything — it just logged me out, and so totally hosed a FileMaker 6 file I was working on in the process that it can’t be recovered or anything. Thank god I have a back up — but DAMNIT Apple, you just cost me two hours worth of painfully tedious work on that file with this little inconvenience. I’m pissed in a very big way right now. Thank you so much.
First it was the external monitor debacle that bit me, now this! Has anyone else had this happen to them? How did you deal with it? Is there something I don’t know about going on here?
[update] It would seem the WindowServer crashing was the culprit according to my crash logs. It could be that there’s a tremendous memory leak in FileMaker 6 (a PPC application which has to run in Rosetta) windowing code. Unfortunately, I don’t have much choice here as the day job is unwilling to upgrade — other than developing FM6 solutions in Windows, which I may have to do now. At any rate, I’ve calmed down somewhat, but I’m still quite annoyed that I lost the 2 hours of work.
Last Call To Report Yasu Issues
A quick note…
As of yet I’ve gotten no reports of trouble from any user regarding the recent Yasu betas that were released last week. So, I’m going to start getting ready to build the final release sometime this week. That means if you’ve had anything to report, now is the time to do it.
If you have something to share, please use my contact form to do it.
