12/3/23: Dark mode improvements

Since it's the season of darkness and twinkle lights, both Write and Notes have dark mode improvements:

  • Notes now supports dark mode on page content. (It's in the Appearance tab of Preferences.) If the text is formatted to be black on white, it's shown in dark mode as white on dark. Also, if the page (or any other) background is white, it's shown dark. Any colored background at all — including page background, note border, or paragraph or table cell background — causes the text to be drawn normally (i.e. black). This doesn't affect printing.
  • Several improvements in support of dark mode were added for Notes. Since Write shares the same word processing engine, it gets those too.

In addition, both apps now allow you to use a solid color for the title row of tables. And finally, Draw has a bug fix. Have a great Christmas, or whatever holiday you may be celebrating this month.



11/6/23: Bugs hibernate in the fall

For the most part this update is about bug fixes, but there are some enhancements too.

  • Write has a new option to prevent typographic quotes (“curly” like this) from being added to a document. This is handy for technical files like source code or crash logs.
  • Photo can show you where a photograph was taken if the metadata contains the GPS data.

The boring but important bug fixes are in Backgammon, Calculator, Draw, and Notes.



9/3/23: A whole bunch of late-summer updates

I had a big list of small things to do, and finally worked my way through it. Here are the results.

  • Notes has several important bug fixes.
  • Calendar has a new feature that allows you to create a repeating event that happens on the same day of the week but some number of weeks apart, for example every third Saturday.
  • Glucose has several improvements to viewing options that make it more customizable. You can change the recommended value range in the chart, and the chart now adjusts automatically to the range of selected values. You can choose which columns appear in the main list.
  • Many apps have very small fixes or improvements, including Calculator, Checkbook, Draw, Jigsaw, Journal, Photo, and Write.



6/9/23: Two small updates and a new app

Calculator has some nice but small enhancements and a bug fix, and Journal has a small improvement as well.

In addition we have a new app: Growly Glucose, a blood sugar tracking app for people who don't want to keep their medical data in the cloud and aren't happy with the more complex offerings from the meter manufacturers or third parties. Glucose is intentionally simple, but it will let you track your blood sugar, weight, stress level, and much more in a very straightforward way.




5/13/23: Lots of updates

Over half of our apps are being updated today. Some have only minor improvements, usually small cosmetic issues. These include Checkbook, Draw, Groceries, Hearts, Photo, and Poker.

Some have more substantial changes:
  • Backup: The app was trying to perform updates (file attribute changes) that didn't need to be done.
  • Calculator: An issue with tabbing through selected cells, and other minor fixes.
  • Jigsaw: New puzzles will be faster when joining pieces together. The change doesn't affect puzzles you've already started.
  • Journal: Some big improvements here. It used to be easy to accidentally overwrite a field, now it's much harder. Undo works better. The bottom scrollbar has been replaced with a scale that shows the range of relevant dates, making it easier to see where you are and where you want to go.
  • Notes: Services→Send to Growly Notes didn't always work properly when the source data contained both text and pictures.
  • Write: There was a problem saving to ePub if the last thing in the document was a picture.




3/12/23: Most games fixed, Notes and Backup improved

I found a very old bug that affected almost every one of our games. All of them except Jigsaw and Poker had it, and all have been updated with the fix.

Backup has a minor cosmetic change.

Notes has bigger changes: you can now lock entire sections and notebooks just as you can lock pages and notes. Plus a few bug fixes, of course.




1/22/23: Bug fix for Calculator, all apps require 10.10 or later

Calculator has a minor fix for importing from Excel.

As of today, all of our apps require Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite or later, which was released in October 2014. If your Mac OS older than that, you shouldn't be downloading new versions of apps anyway — it's dangerous.




1/12/23: Bug fixes for Write and Notes

I just found a dangerous bug in Write that could also affect Notes. Both of them are fixed now. Also, Notes has a few other small bug fixes.

Checkers has a new option that increases the contrast for black pieces to make them easier to see.




1/4/23: Website refresh, app updates

With the new year, the GrowlyBird website has adopted a new, cleaner look. The content is pretty much the same. We hope you like the change.

Several updates to our apps to go along with the housecleaning:
  • Notes: Fixes for searching, HTML export, and using the ruler with lists. Plenty of other bug fixes.
  • Write: A new cleanup command for exporting to Word via RTF, fixes for HTML and ePub export, and using the ruler with lists. And lots more bug fixes.
  • Backup: Backups that were done yesterday and today are listed with a more useful "last backup" value than just the date.
  • Bug fixes for Draw and Groceries.

You may have noticed the blurb last year that we were considering deleting the games from our website due to lack of interest. We have decided not to do that. Even though each game is downloaded only an average of 3 times a month, it takes very little work on our part to keep them available. And we know some of you do use them. So Happy New Year.