TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 21 January 2013

Quicksilver β71 — The open-source keyboard launcher Quicksilver has been updated to version β71 with a multitude of improvements and fixes as well as cosmetic changes — including new icons and a modernized look for the Bezel interface. At the top of the list, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion’s Notification Center has been added as a notification handler and iCloud documents are displayed after right-arrowing into an iCloud-compatible application. The update also improves several aspects of its alternate action behavior, including adding the capability to hold the Command key down to select available alternate actions; enabling alternate
actions to be viewed in the Actions preferences; and adding new alternate actions for moving, copying, opening files with a specified app, running at a specified time, and creating a link. Also new are localizations for Czech, French, German, Spanish, Welsh, and Chinese (Taiwan). (Free, 3.6 MB, release notes)

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Sandvox 2.7.4 — Karelia has released Sandvox 2.7.4 with improved performance while saving files (especially for people running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard), editing, and dragging media into the Web authoring tool. The update also adds local publishing setup compatibility to OS X 10.7.2 and earlier, ignores image filename extensions when dragged from the Finder, fixes a problem where an exported site’s resources could be placed in the wrong location, and resolves an issue where Sandvox would forget what it had published when dealing with host setups whose folder begins with two or more slashes. ($79.99 new from Karelia or the
Mac App Store, free update, 31.2 MB)

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LaunchBar 5.4.1 — Objective Development has released LaunchBar 5.4.1 with a wide-ranging list of enhancements to the keyboard launcher, including improved compatibility with iTunes 11. Other iTunes-related changes include a fix for an issue that failed to “Go to Current Song” when playing a song via LaunchBar; a fix for a Show in iTunes action failure; and redesigned icons for Artist, Album, and Track. The update also modifies the behavior of the “Switch to Calculator when typing digits” option, which now makes it possible to enter abbreviations that start with a digit (such as 1P to open 1Password) even with this preference turned on. Dash support for developers looking up API documentation is improved, enabling you to select Dash and then press the Spacebar to trigger the “Look up in Dash” action. The release also improves VoiceOver support in the index window, display of an app’s recent documents, indexing and display of mounted volumes, compatibility with SparkleShare, commands for Assign Abbreviation and Show in Index, and detection of labeled email addresses during Instant Send. Finally, LaunchBar fixes an issue that prevented the app from hiding after receiving a file via drag and drop.
($35 new with a 20-percent discount for TidBITS members, free update, 2.5 MB, release notes)

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PDFpen and PDFpenPro 5.9.4 — Smile has updated PDFpen and PDFpenPro to version 5.9.4, both of which reduce overall memory usage for improved performance. The PDF-manipulation programs gain improvements in OCR error handling, as well as opening documents that didn’t correctly adhere to PDF specifications. PDFpenPro also resolves a sandboxing issue when creating new PDFs from local HTML files. As of this writing, both PDFpen and PDFpenPro haven’t been updated to this latest version in the Mac App Store (they’re both still stuck on version 5.9.3). ($59.95/$99.95
new with a 20-percent discount for TidBITS members, free update, 47.5/48.5 MB)

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