11/22/25: Trio of Tiny Thanksgiving Treats

This is a very small update. Each of three apps — Draw, Notes, and Write — has one bug fix each. Ordinarily I would wait for more changes instead of issuing such a minor update, but real people (no AIs) are waiting for the fixes, so here they are. Anyway, it was a great opportunity to practice my alliterative skills.



10/17/25: Minor updates

Here are some small updates just to prove that the cold I recently endured didn't kill me.

  • Backup has always had an annoying feature: if you (or the OS) deleted a file between when the analysis phase marked it for copying and when the backup phase actually copied it, Backup would consider it a serious error and stop. After all these years I've decided that we can trust the analysis—if the file is missing, then it's not there, and there's no reason to copy it.
  • Draw had problems with typing new values in some measurement fields: if you specified units other than the default (inches vs. points) the value would be wrong.
  • Write had some issues with frames and text boxes, including some obscure crashes.



9/26/25: Mac OS 26 Tahoe

The date of this update was, I swear, coincidental. As usual, Apple changed some things under the hood in the latest release of Mac OS, requiring me to update a few of the GrowlyBird apps.

  • Backup has a minor fix.
  • Calendar could not accept updates dragged from Mail. This could also happen in Mac OS 15, so everyone who cares should take this update.
  • Draw had a really irritating but not fatal problem with text.
  • Notes had the biggest issues. See below.
  • Pinochle had a crash when clicking cards.

In Notes, notebooks on Tahoe were invisible if you merged windows into tabs. I spent a lot of time trying to resolve this problem and finally had to admit defeat. Therefore, starting with Tahoe, Notes no longer allows merging windows into tabs: every notebook is in its own window, like in Mac OS versions before 10.12. I know this will be a problem for some people, but there's no alternative, so if you absolutely need tabbed windows, don't take this update. Unfortunately, there is another problem: Format→Show Fonts doesn't work properly in Notes on Tahoe, but you can work around this by using the Change Font button in the format panel instead.

I will revisit this issue when new Mac OS updates arrive. If whatever Apple changed gets fixed, I will reenable tabbed windows in Notes.



9/15/25: Falling free

It's almost fall, but here are some apps dropping from the sky. From the clouds, you might say.

  • Backup, Calendar, and Journal have some minor fixes and improvements.
  • All apps that allow you to specify measurements now handle metric values much better. This is true whether you set the default units to centimeters, or just specify a metric value for one field. The change affects Calculator, Draw, Notes, and Write. Note that there are still some fields in the format panel that prefer to use points; numbers entered into these fields may be modified slightly.
  • Draw also has some other minor fixes.
  • Both Notes and Write now handle lists pasted from Word, or contained in RTF files, much better than before.
  • Notes has an additional improvement: text pasted from other apps can contain formatting that you couldn't easily turn off until now. Some other bug fixes too.
  • Write has quite a few other bug fixes and minor improvements.

Check the help files for these apps after downloading to see the particulars.



4/22/25: Contacting us just got easier

Somehow, without my noticing, the Contact Growlybird command on the Help menu of recently-updated apps got broken. Now it's working again. This is the only change to these apps, so if you don't want to contact us, feel free to ignore the update to Backup, Calculator, Jigsaw, Notes, Photo, and Write.

Journal also has a useful new preference. I noticed when updating my own journal on my laptop that on Macs that have touch bars it's too easy to accidentally type the escape key, which by convention removes all changes to the current field without the possibility of undo. If you're a clumsy typist, as I am, you will want to turn on the new option to ignore the escape key.



3/20/25: Another Notes bug fix

The two recent fixes for Notes were correct but not sufficient to fix the problem a few users were experiencing. I got it on the second try. This bug could corrupt notebook files, so please upgrade now.



3/16/25: Notes bug fixes

Notes had two rare bugs that seemed to affect some users repeatedly and most people never. I squashed them.



2/23/25: Backup… oops

I missed an item on my to-do list for Backup in yesterday's update, a minor UI glitch. The Stop button is now enabled when you start a backup. Sorry, folks.



2/22/25: Some tweaks to commonly-updated apps

Here's a batch of bug fixes and minor improvements. It seems like almost every update has a change to most of these.

  • Backup now allows you to eject your backup disks without having to go to the Finder to do it. This is handy especially when you backup to a partition of an external drive: it ejects all partitions without asking. The Finder always asks if you want to eject them all.
  • Calculator has some important bug fixes.
  • Notes used to optionally expand a new text note as you typed the first line. That got broken somehow (I don't know when), but it's fixed now.
  • Write had a problem saving to HTML and EPUB files: sometimes the formatting of text would be wrong.