I came across this article via Daring Fireball.

In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto “A word is worth a thousand pictures.” This still holds true. Unfortunately, the labels for Dock icons don’t appear until the mouse passes over them. A user looking for one of six Word documents must scrub the mouse back and forth along the length of the Dock until a particular label appears.

The last sentence is just as true for folders. And that’s exactly why I wrote FolderBrander. It lets me quickly place a short text label over a folder icon. Check it out.

Alexis Kayhill over at Mac360 wrote some nice things about SnapNDrag.

I came across this user review for SizzlingKeys on VersionTracker. It includes this question,

WHY AREN’T YOU CHARGING FOR THIS APP??

I frequently receive emails from users thanking me for creating SizzlingKeys. But asking WHY I’m making it free given how good it is, now that’s a compliment.

After reading MacApper’s review of EasyCrop, I started working on adding Undo/Redo to the app.

EasyCrop 2.4 is now available for download, or visit the product page for more information.

MacApper posted a nice review of EasyCrop about a month ago.

EasyCrop scored a B+. While a B+ doesn’t sound like much to brag about, the review is actually very positive. Jim Squires, the reviewer, totally gets what I set out to do with EasyCrop, which is to create a tool that does one thing (ok, a couple of things) and does it well. My favorite quote from the review is,

EasyCrop is light on frivilous add-ons and big on sensible extras. Asides from these little tweaks, EasyCrop is a program that does little more than live up to its name. It’s easy. It crops. That’s it. And that’s all it needs to be.

Jim noted a few shortcomings, namely the lack of undo and the option to un-constrain the aspect ratio. I think those are good points, particularly the first one.

Apple sent out an email to MobileMe users yesterday notifying them that the .Mac HomePage web application will be discontinued on July 7, 2009. I’ve since gotten a bunch of emails from FileChute users wanting to know how this would affect them.

From what I understand, the HomePage web application will be discontinued, but your Sites folder on your iDisk will continue to exist and whatever is in there will continue to be accessible from the web. So if you’re using FileChute with the homepage.mac.com domain, it should continue to work.

However, just to be safe, you should switch over to the new web.me.com domain. To do so, open FileChute’s preference window and click on the “+” button near the bottom left. When presented with the Account Type choices, select the first one.

In the recently released iTunes 8.1, the “Party Shuffle” playlist is renamed “iTunes DJ”. This together with SizzlingKeys’ simplistic way of getting the Party Shuffle playlist by name broke the “Add to Party Shuffle” feature in the Search Window.

SizzlingKeys 3.2.8 fixes this issue. As a bonus, “Add to iTunes DJ” now works for non-English localization as well.

I’ve just released FileChute 4.1.1 to address the issue mentioned in the previous post. As always, updates are free to existing users. You can download this latest version from the FileChute product page.

Due to changes on snipr.com, FileChute’s Short URL feature is broken (when the recipient clicks on the link, they’ll be prompted for a password on snipr.com instead). I will address this as soon as I can. As I am on vacation and traveling with my two young kids, finding time to fix this will be a challenge!

In the meantime, you’ll have to disable the Short URL feature and send the un-shortened links.

Thank you for your patience and happy Chinese New Year.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted a nice review of FileChute today.

“Sure, there are lots of ways to transfer files, but this application makes it drop dead easy.”