11/14/22: Mac OS 13 Ventura support, and lots more

Nine of our apps are being updated today. All of them have now been tested with Mac OS 13, but we also had many other changes waiting until we could finish that.

Write and Notes now have a menu command for selecting whole table columns, which is sometimes easier than doing it with the mouse. Both also have several other enhancements and bug fixes.

In Draw, it's easy to accidentally stop creating a polygon before you mean to by double-clicking. Now you can resume construction of any polygon with a new menu command.

Calculator has new functions for physical constants such as the speed of light and the gravitational constant. It's also easier to finish creating formulas when you allow multiple lines in text cells.

Calendar, Checkbook, Journal, Photo, and Pinochle have minor fixes and/or improvements.



8/22/22: Fixes for Notes, Write, and Checkers

Notes and Write suffered rare and obscure crashes which are now fixed. Write also has a few other changes. Checkers didn't crash, but the computer player had a logic error.



6/25/22: Color corrections, minor enhancements

A change that affected some of the apps from the last update caused problems with choosing colors. Some apps have colors in Preferences, and those colors tended to drift toward white each time you started the app. And in all of these the colors you chose in the color picker were not stored accurately.

The affected apps are Calculator, Calendar, Draw, Notes, and Write.

Also some small improvements:
  • Write and Notes can now read the secondary notes from OPML files created by OmniOutliner.
  • Text cells in Calculator can contain line breaks if you turn on a new preference. The row height does not adjust automatically, you have to do it manually. And line breaks in formulas, numbers, and dates will cause parsing problems, so don't do that.



6/15/22: Abandoning Mac OS 10.8 and 10.9, and 10 updates

Beginning today, all updated GrowlyBird apps will require Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite. It's nearly impossible to access our website from older systems now, so there's no point supporting them anymore. It's been 4 years since we abandoned 10.7 — and 10.8 is now 10 years old. Time to move on.

Ten of our apps are being updated today:
  • Write has several useful improvements.
  • I have a long list of user requests for Notes. For this release I winnowed them and came up with some useful updates, including:
    • Remarks for pages, sections, and notebooks. This lets you record information about these things (source info, to-do lists, etc.) without having to add notes to the page.
    • You can search for a specific tag using Tools/Find with Options.
    • Notes can read OPML files, which was an export option for Circus Ponies Notebook.
    • The back/forward navigation buttons on the toolbar are now global, taking you across notebooks if necessary. This is the way it worked before version 4, but if you prefer the buttons to stay in the same notebook you can turn this behavior off in Preferences.
    • You can start all new text notes with the current date and/or time. This is in Preferences too.
    • And a few other minor changes.
  • The following also have minor fixes or changes: Backup, Calculator, Calendar, Checkers, Cribbage, Draw, Hearts, Pinochle.



5/5/22: The status of games

We are considering retiring all of our games due to lack of interest. That would mean that people who already have them could get updates using Check for Updates in the app, but they would no longer appear on our website. If you have an opinion on this, please let us know. Nothing will be done until the end of the year.



4/8/22: Minor bug fixes

Three apps have minor updates: Calculator, Jigsaw, and Write.



2/14/22: Draw fix

The last update to Draw accidentally broke the shadow color property of shapes. It's fixed now.



2/5/22: Updates and a new game

We've spent the last few months finishing and moving into a new house, so GrowlyBird has been on the back burner. Here are some tidbits to make up for it.

  • Notes and Write can now read the text notes from the Stickies app, both the older version that saved its notes in a database and the newer version that saves them to individual files.
  • Draw has a small enhancement that I find is a big help: you can set the zoom/magnification to whole percentages (100%, 200%, …) by typing command-1, command-2, etc.
  • Also, a very minor tweak to Backup for Big Sur and Monterey.

I've always loved doing jigsaw puzzles, so we now offer a new app, Growly Jigsaw, for playing them on your Mac. There are over a dozen built-in puzzles, plus almost 150 on our website accessible from within the app. Or you can make a puzzle from your own picture. Any puzzle can have from 50 to 1000 pieces, so they range from trivial to very challenging. Have fun!