It’s been ages since the last release, but we have been hard at work on Xbox Live Friends 4.

This version is miles better than any of the previous versions, and miles better than anything else like it on the Mac.

Head over to the Xbox Live Friends site and check out screenshots, screencasts, and then download it!

Bonus: Since Xbox Live Friends now supports Growl, we’ve made an Xbox 360-themed Growl Style which you can download here.

Just a quick update on Xbox Live Friends: it still exists, and I’m working on it when I can. To prove it, here is a shot of the new Gamer Info window. However, we’re a one-man team over here so it’s a little tough to get things done.

All that needs to happen is to fix some bugs and then it should be ready. However, these are tricky bugs that will probably take a little time to solve.

Massive apologies about the delay, but the new version should be pretty cool.

In the interim, a brainstorming session about which games have online stats that could be added to XLF would be interesting. Halo 3 is the only one I can think of. (Rock Band and GTAIV both have websites that do not work for screen-scraping, which is unfortunate).

• New, more compact, design for the options toolbar
• “Clear Lyrics” button now works correctly
• Additional international support for artists and titles with special characters in the name, like Mötorhead

Harmonic 2.3

After the jump, there’s a story! A boring story! For developers!

And now, a little design aside you might find interesting (but probably won’t). This is just a sort of long-winded story about a minor change to Harmonic. This change is in the new options toolbar: the removal of the “paste lyrics” button when there are already lyrics available. The reason for this is that I have been inundated with comments, reviews, and emails about the paste button not working correctly.

However, the paste button has always worked correctly but it seems like the previous placement in Harmonic has revealed that a startling amount of people do not understand how copy and paste works.

Every single person who contacted me about this was attempting to use the “paste” button to insert the existing lyrics into iTunes (which Harmonic does automatically — if you see the lyrics in Harmonic, they are saved in iTunes). The confusion, I believe, is partially related to the Dashboard metaphor, which implies a layer ancillary to the normal “application” layer, as widgets do not have the standard accoutrements of applications: active icons in the Dock, visibility in the Command + Tab application switcher panel, or a menu bar. The key item here is the last one: a menu bar. When you activate Dashboard, you can still see the active menu bar of the application you were using (presumably iTunes in this case). This can be confusing, especially with a function like copy and paste which is an application-wide function. Because of this, and because of Harmonic’s tight integration with iTunes anyway, there is an expectation that the widget is somehow “part” of iTunes’ interface. Therefore, the “paste” button is assumed to perform an operation on iTunes rather than Harmonic.

This assumption is certainly flawed, because the other buttons in the widget do not perform an operation on iTunes except for the “Clear Lyrics” button. Except, if someone was under the impression that they needed to insert the lyrics into iTunes then they likely would not also think that “Clear Lyrics” cleared the lyrics in iTunes. But the major flaw in this logic is the fundamental misunderstanding of copy and paste: to expect the lyrics to be pasted somewhere, they would first have to be copied. This, I think, is another example of people who are not too familiar with computers muddling up the terms, such as when people use “download” when they mean “install”. This, of course, is to be expected and it is the job of the designer to make the application easy to use for everybody. This kind of thing, however, rather difficult for “power users” (that’s a dumb term, but I can’t think of a better one) to consider when laying out an interface. Thinking about this will help you design something that is always clear. So, the moral of the story is to assume nothing about your users when designing an interface. Wasn’t that a great story? I’ve got more!

This should resolve the “Host ‘pedlfaster.pedlr.com’ is blocked because of many connection errors” issue.

Harmonic 2.2.1

Edit (March 16): LyricWiki is operational again!

It’s been a couple years since Symphonic received an update. The winds, they are a-changin’.

This is quick maintenance update to Symphonic. Here’s what’s new:

• New (and working) update system. It’s now much more obvious when there is an update.
• Links to user manual fixed
• Cleaned up some code

Head on over to the Symphonic page to download it.

So, welcome to Harmonic 2.2. Here’s what’s new:

• New colors: indigo and pink
• Looks nicer when the lyrics are set to “Instrumental”
• Fixed issue where preferences button was hidden on some color schemes
• Preferences button is now on the left
• More reliably finds lyrics under alternate names and through LyricWiki redirects
• Fixed an issue with ColorSync that could cause Harmonic to look funny on some monitor setups
• Made the “Update Available” banner more obviously clickable
• Tweaked preferences layout

Please download the new version and enjoy!

In case you’re wondering why the odd number leap, version 2.1 came out last night, but there was an issue with Tiger compatibility, but that’s been fixed.

This version is fully compatible with the latest versions of Tiger and Leopard.

So please, enjoy the new digs, and leave comments like no other!

Our apps and widgets are all zipped with Mac OS X’s built-in unzipper. For some reason, this creates issues with old programs like StuffIt Expander.

If you’re having trouble unzipping, control+click the zip file and open it with “Archive Utility” (10.5 Leopard) or “BOMArchiveHelper” (10.4 Tiger). I also suggest you set all your zip files to open with these built-in apps, as they are simple and fast.