Two updates today. Both Cashculator and Blast get minor but important updates.

Cashculator 1.2.10 fixes some important bugs:

• Table grid drawing fix in Lion (wasn’t in 1.2.7)
• Full-screen mode in Lion (wasn’t in 1.2.7)
• Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented saving of the database (“month is a required value” message).
• Fixed issue that sometimes arises when people move to another Mac or change username
• Fixes to tutorial UI

Blast 1.7.5 also brings some important bug and usability fixes:

• Fix crash on launch for some users.
• Fix bug where some of the results reappeared after cleaning the list.
• Don’t show Blast off-screen if the icon is too far right on the menu bar
• Blast’s window height will adjust if it’s too high for the screen resolution
• Return focus to previous application when closing Blast’s window
• Some memory and speed optimization

The updates are now available both on the Mac App Store and for direct version users. Direct customers can update right from the applications or download new versions from the web site and overwrite their copies.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving and upcoming “Black Friday” we are glad to give to our users an amazing 40% discount on Cashculator (Mac and iPhone versions) and ImageFramer applications.

Cashculator will enable you to track your expenses on Black Friday sales and keep you from getting broke and ImageFramer will allow you to frame holiday photos of your family

The discount lasts until November 29th. To get the discount, use the coupon code FRIDAY on our site or purchase directly on the App Store at the same special price!

Continuing with the recent addition of Holidays and Celebrations collection, starting with Halloween frames about month ago, we now added Thanksgiving and Christmas sets.

We’ve added 17 frames for Thanksgiving and 44 for Christmas and one bonus frame in “Artistic” collection, “Various” set. All are vector frames, looking great at any resolution. Some of these frames can be used not only for these holidays, so we encourage you to take a look at them all and see if you can adapt them to other occasions as well.

Most of the frames are adapted for both horizontal and vertical orientations. Many of the frames are border-type frames, whose width can be adjusted. Check below how the icons look in ImageFramer and some framed images for demonstration.

How do you get the new frames?

It’s simple – select “Check for library updates” from ImageFramer menu. ImageFramer will even detect the news frames automatically if you have enabled “Automatic updates of frame library on startup” from preferences dialog.

Is it free?

The new frame colection is free for all registered ImageFramer users, including these who purchased ImageFramer on Mac App Store. There’s no catch – we just love our users

Enjoy the new frames and help us spread the word about ImageFramer!

Socialite 1.3.9 is now available both on the Mac App Store (which skipped version 1.3.8) and for our direct customers. The release notes for 1.3.9 are short but important:

• Fix Facebook image uploading.
• Fix Growl 1.3 support for some customers who were unable to activate the notifications.
• Fix double Growl notification which appeared in some cases.

So, as usual, either check for updates from within Socialite or fire up App Store, if your copy is from there.

Halloween is almost upon us. You’re probably going to take a lot of pictures of you or of your kids in costumes and at parties. Maybe you need to design a pretty but scary invitation and need the final touch.

ImageFramer introduces a new “Holidays and Celebrations” collection with its first set – “Halloween”. This set includes a total of 35 vector frames, including 8 resizable borders and several gray frames (to be colored in any color with the Colorize option) and masks.

These true vector frames provide the best quality on images of any resolution. In addition, almost all of the frames include both vertical and horizontal versions, so they’ll look great on any photo, without distortion.

Take a look at the selection of frames as it is presented in ImageFramer’s Library and at the couple of framed examples below.

How do you get the new frames?

It’s simple – select “Check for library updates” from ImageFramer menu. ImageFramer will even detect the news frames automatically if you have enabled “Automatic updates of frame library on startup” from preferences dialog.

Is it free?

The new frame colection is free for all registered ImageFramer users, including these who purchased ImageFramer on Mac App Store. There’s no catch – we just love our users

Enjoy the new frames and help us spread the word about ImageFramer!

Socialite 1.3.8 brings compatibility with Growl 1.3 (available from the Mac App Store only).

It also fixes an issue that some customers had which manifested itself like Google Reader and possibly other accounts weren’t saved between launches.

Last, it increases the number of unread articles that Socialite will fetch for each Google Reader feed from 100 to 1000. This is needed if your feeds generate more than 100 new articles between the times that you check the feeds.

Socialite 1.3.8 was also submitted today to the Mac App Store but as always, there’s no way to know when it’ll be released.

P.S. RIP Steve Jobs, your life is an inspiration to generations of entrepreneurs.

MOST IMPORTANT: This release is required for all Facebook users as it supports the newer OAuth2 authentication, while the older one is being deprecated from Oct 1.

NOTE: You’ll be prompted to login into your Facebook accounts again. This will be required to do only once, for the new Socialite authentication information to be stored. Socialite doesn’t store your Facebook email or password anywhere.

Full release notes:

• Facebook authentication converted to OAuth2. Older version of Socialite probably won’t work with Facebook from Oct 1.
• Facebook authentication now improved, in that it now correctly handles authorization of multiple Facebook accounts from within Socialite, without the need to log out of Facebook in Safari, when adding a second account.
• REPLY ALL: In Twitter, the “Reply” function now serves as combined “Reply All”. If other users’ accounts are mentioned in the tweet you reply to, they’ll be added to the reply and selected. You can then press right arrow to deselect the text and reply to all of them or start typing your text if you only wanted to answer to the author of the tweet.
• Fixed some bugs with detection of URLs in tweets and status updates. Including quotes of various types and other common characters.
• Improved the behaviour of the splitter used for quick-input and preview pane.
• Possible workaround of a common crash case

Version 1.3.7 was also submitted today to the Mac App Store but it’s still not available there. Check App Store daily to get the update when Apple approves it.

Today (Aug 3rd) we released to the Mac App Store version 1.2.8 Cashculator Free. Only the free version was updated and it includes the following important changes:

• It is Lion-only. It won’t run on Snow Leopard.
• It can now be unlocked through In-App purchase to have all the features of the regular Cashculator version. This means unlimited planning into the future and unlimited number of “what-if” scenarios.
• Cashculator is now working inside the sandbox, which is an important new security feature in Lion. This brings increased protection from possible hackers if they break Cashculator to do their bidding. For example, Cashculator now won’t be able to access files on your file system, except the files it needs for work or your CSV exports.
• Important: Because Cashculator works in the sandbox now, it also means that the database is moved to the application’s container, which is a special folder in the user’s Library folder (which is by default hidden in Lion).
  In non-sandbox Cashculator, the database was at [user home]/Library/Application Support/cashculator/ folder, and now it is in [user home]/Library/Containers/com.apparentsoft.cashculatorfree/Data/Library/Application Support/cashculator/. Yes, much deeper in the folder hierarchy.
• One of the features that was hit by sandboxing was the ability to have Cashculator’s database in any location in the file system and not only inside the Application Support. This is now not possible (remember the container?) so if you had your database in a custom folder, you should copy it inside the container folder above. If you didn’t move your database manually, you don’t need to do anything. All files will be moved inside the container automatically.

To celebrate this event we temporarily set the price of the in-app purchase at 33% discount of the regular price.

Note, only the Free edition of Cashculator requires OS X Lion. The regular version of Cashculator on the Mac App Store works on 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and the version available directly on our site is a Universal binary running on PPC or Intel on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Important bug fixes in this version. Everyone is encouraged to update. It was also submitted to the Mac App Store, so will be there within a week, most probably.

Release notes:

• Fixed: sometimes the file that was shown as selected was not the one that was operated upon.
• Save recent files list every minute for better persistence in case of abnormal exit from the application.
• Fixed: the excluded items list was sometimes not persisted between launches.
system

Update from within Blast, or download from Blast download page.

It’s a big day today in Apparent Software land! We would like you all to welcome Mike Glass into our little company. Mike is an experienced Mac and iOS developer with several years behind his belt at Pocket Sevens, developing his own applications and helping numerous clients with their projects.

Mike will join us full time and his first mission will be to help us bring Socialite 2 to fruition, ripe and tasty, to everyone’s delight. This second version of Socialite is challenging us on many levels and I’m sure with Mike’s expertise we’ll be able to deliver it much faster and with fabulous quality, as our customers expect it.

Following Socialite for Mac, Mike’s experience with iOS development will play a pivotal role in bringing Socialite to the iPad. We are really excited about the possibilities that an iPad version, synchronized with its Mac counterpart will present.

You can read more about Mike on our company’s About page.

Excited,
Jacob.