BravoBug News

Just a quick update to let you know what’s in the frying pan at the moment. BravoBug is working on a brand new freeware app (details to come soon), plus significant updates to several of our Shareware apps. Some of the stuff we’re working on at the moment:

• Blackout 3.1 (more global hotkey options, more display options)
• MiLife 2.0 (new text rendering engine, plus other fun stuff)
• EasyBatch 1.3 (more batch options, including landscape/portrait detection and percentage-based resizing)
• IconBurglar 1.1 (improved search options, clipboard support, more all-purpose file icon support)

Some of these are big ‘whopper’ updates which will be in development for a while, but we’ll be getting them released as soon as possible, so stay tuned!

Thank you for supporting BravoBug Software, and thanks for visiting the blog!

A 13-year-old downloaded the billionth application from the Apple App Store, becoming the grand-prize winner in the company’s app countdown contest, the Apple said Friday.

Connor Mulcahey of Weston, Conn., will receive a $10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule backup system for the Mac, and a MacBook Pro.

When asked what he planned to buy with his $10,000 iTunes card, the teen said he planned to purchase 1,001 copies of Miley Cyrus’ hit album ‘Breakout’. An Apple spokesperson was quoted as saying, ‘Well geez, that was money well spent.’

Meanwhile Apple has ’shaken up a controversy’ with its latest iPhone app approval debacle: a ‘baby shaking’ app that presents an image of an infant and simulates crying sounds, prompting users to see how long they can withstand the noise before ’shaking the baby’ to silence it. When shaken, red X’s appear over the eyes of the baby.

While Apple has officially apologized for approving the app and has subsequently removed it from the App store, some say that it is not Apple’s place to be deciding what apps are approved or rejected, and that such matters should be left to the market and to the iPhone community to begin with.

Apple, however, remains committed to its high quality standards for the iPhone. Apple announced it would be removing all shaking apps including its “Shake it like a polaroid picture” app, “Shake it up baby now” app, and “Shake shake shake, shake shake shake, shake your booty” app.

“It is clear that the approval of this deeply offense app was an error in judgment. Apple’s goal is to ensure that every app available for the iPhone is made in good taste, and serves a genuine purpose to its users.”

The 43,000 different ‘farting’ apps on the app store are still available for purchase.

Here’s a quick and silly video that was made to show a few of the uses of Blackout 3. Be sure to check out the official press release and announcement posts below for more info, or just skip all this and download Blackout and check it out for yourself! (Requires Mac OS X 10.5)

BravoBug Software is proud to announce today the release of its newest app for Mac OS X: Blackout 3.0. Blackout 3 is a completely revamped version of our popular Blackout screen dimming tool, which offers a unique way to help you stay focused on your Mac’s screen – without destroying your eyesight.

Blackout can dim your Mac’s screen without modifying any of your hardware or gamma settings. But it goes much, much further than that! Blackout 3.0 includes new Spotlight and Soft Edges modes which help you stay focused on what matters. Use the Spotlight mode to create a circle of light which can follow your mouse cursor, or stay fixed at a specific place – any size, any location. Use the Soft Edges style to subtly dim the corners of your screen, helping you stay focused on the work at hand.

Blackout is fully customizable, with a system-wide menu, a global hotkey, and color customization. It will even switch automatically as you tab between Spaces in Mac OS Leopard.

Download Blackout 3.0 here. With this major overhaul, Blackout has been changed to Shareware as BravoBug is planning continued improvements and updates. If you enjoy it, please help support its development by purchasing a license key for your copy. Thank you for visiting and thanks for your support!

Official Press Release:

The final touches are being put onto Blackout 3, and it should be a very fun release. This new version has a lot of spiffy new features – it’s basically a whole new app. More info to come! Thanks for visiting.

Expanding the functionality of the popular screen-dimming tool Blackout for Mac OS X, BravoBug Software is proud to announce the upcoming release of Blackout 3.0.

This new version of Blackout brings the ‘Cool factor’ up tenfold, adding a multitude of new options, including color selection, an improved interface, new display styles, and much more!

The new features in Blackout 3.0 are just too freaking cool to list here before the actual release, so please stay tuned!

Thank you for visiting!

For those of you who have been following the trial… The creators of Pirate Bay – the famous (notorious?) website that serves as a central database and gateway for people using peer-to-peer filesharing software – have been sentenced by a Swedish court to serve 1 year in jail and pay a fine of $4.3 million dollars to various companies claiming damages, including Warner Brothers, Sony, and Columbia.

The case is significant because of the nature of the website, which doesn’t technically break any laws (at least not any more than Google, which links to and hosts copyrighted content every day also). Regardless, the three admins for Pirate Bay were charged with ‘assisting copyright infringement’. Meanwhile, similar sites such as Torrentfreak are still operating. The creators say they plan to appeal, and team member Peter Sunde said of the verdict:

“It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”

News has begun circulating of the first known all-Mac ‘botnet’ that has begun a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on an unknown webserver. The Macs were all compromised by a trojan hidden in pirated copies of iWork ‘09 and Photoshop CS4.

More info here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3157

I was going to write a big long essay here on the philosophy behind what makes certain music good for programming and certain music terrible for it (as if anyone but us whiny, neurotic programmers cared!). But instead I think I’ll just plug what I’m listening to right now..

(PS: Stay tuned for some announcements on the next BravoBug update, should be posted in a few days! Thank you very much for visiting and supporting indie mac software.)

Nightwalker by Trentemøller

It seems like there’s nothing but bad news being reported as of late. So it’s always nice to see an AP video of something small (but compassionate) like this.