Pilotmoon Software

PopClip Forum

2022-05-02T10:30:00+00:00

In October 2021, I launched the PopClip Forum. It has grown to nearly 500 users and people are helping each other out with making extensions, reporting bugs, talking about feature ideas, and so on. I am pleased that it is beginning to look like a PopClip community.

Since starting the forum, I haven’t posted here on the blog. I’ve found that the forum is a more compelling outlet for posting a lot of the things I previously put here. So, make sure to check out the forum if you are interested in my latest thoughts.

PopClip Extensions on macOS Monterey

2021-09-15T08:30:00+00:00

The offending error.

Those of you testing the betas of macOS Monterey may have discovered some PopClip extensions missing, and the message Cannot Install Extension […] No such executable file: /usr/bin/php when trying to install them.

To get the missing extensions back:

Make sure you are running the latest version of PopClip (2021.10).
Install the updated extensions, listed here.

More info, for the curious

This happens because macOS Monterey does not ship with the PHP scripting language runtime, which some extensions need.

Some solutions I considered:

Port these extensions to a different scripting language such as Python, Ruby, etc. This seems a very practial short term solution, but none is guaranteed to remain in macOS in future.¹
Keep them in PHP and require users to install PHP themselves with homebrew or similar. Too many hoops to jump through for non-technical users, for what is supposed to be a simple time-saving tool.
Keep them in PHP and ship a PHP runtime with PopClip. — I don’t fancy maintaining a PHP runtime distribution.

Instead, I have updated PopClip to support a new kind of extension, written in JavaScript. PopClip runs the JavaScript code directly, instead of calling out to an external executable. The new extensions are lightning fast, and hopefully now future proof. Having the scripting system built into the app also opens up new possibilities for what PopClip extensions can do.

It’s going to take me some time to port all the remaining PHP extensions to JavaScript. I will keep ~~this post~~the forum post updated as I go.

I will also put out documentation for creating your own JavaScript extensions in due course.

Update 30 Sep 2021: Post edited and fleshed out following the release of PopClip 2021.9.

Update 24 Oct 2021: Moved extensions list lo linked forum post.

The macOS 10.15 release notes state: “Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include scripting language runtimes by default, and might require you to install additional packages.” ↩

Notes on RapidClick 1.5, and storytime

2021-04-23T12:00:00+00:00

Yesterday I released an update (v1.5) to RapidClick, my auto clicker app. The headline changes:

Universal app for both Intel and Apple Silicon (of course);
Increased the maximum click rate from 20 to 50 clicks per second¹ (something highly requested in emails and App Store reviews);
For intervals of more than 1 second, the time is now displayed as minutes:seconds and there is a countdown to the next click.

RapidClick now shows a countdown to the next click.

The update was long overdue, also fixing a long standing problem where RapidClick would crash if the user denied the system Accessibility permission prompt. Now there is a proper welcome UI flow to guide the user to enable the permission.

Every developer loves the Secutiry & Privacy preferences pane.

This permission prompt is the kind of UI flow that is really fiddly to make, and yet the user sees it only once in the lifetime of the app. If it is implemented well, they probably never really notice it it all. I did it here with this kind of bubble thing. I think it works.²

Story time

It’s also now RapidClick’s 10 year anniversary. I don’t talk about RapidClick very much – it is a very simple app and it’s not especially interesting to most people. And yet, it was a very important step in my Mac development “career”. It was the second app I ever published – a few months before PopClip.

At that time I had already released DwellClick (both 1.0 and 2.0), which I had spent more than a year of my life working on. It sold very few copies and I was close to giving up. It was RapidClick that actually broke through and sold enough to make me think there might be some possibility in this whole app development thing.

RapidClick 1.0 (2011) vs 1.5 (2021).

RapidClick first appeared on the Mac App Store on 25th March 2011.

It started as an offshoot from DwellClick, my assistive app for using a Mac without pressing a mouse button. A DwellClick customer had emailed me: “The mouse is not fast enough for me. I play Farm Town and need a mouse that ‘clicks’ as soon as I hover over a section to be harvested or plowed.”

I was initially confused because I had never heard of auto clicking functionality of this kind. After a few emails back and forth emails with my helpful customer, I realised that there might be a market for simple and easy-to-use autoclicking tool.

At the time, there were very few auto clickers of this kind available for the Mac. In fact, in 2011 there was only one I knew of: eFarmer.

I decided to make my own auto clicker, focusing on simplicity and ease of use. I decided it should have a big red start/stop button and just two other buttons for setting speed. I also wanted it to make a clicking sound and a cursor flash because I felt that seeing and hearing what the app was doing was was important for the user experience. In a few weeks, RapidClick was born.³

At the time, the Mac App Store was brand new, having debuted in January that year. And if you Googled for “Mac auto clicker”, you would only find a lot of forum posts asking for such an app. There were no results for actual auto clicker apps! So RapidClick filled a small niche and quickly started to sell a handful of copies a day at its price of $2.99.⁴

This was really encouraging to me. It gave me the confidence to try out other “small app” ideas, which led to me creating PopClip — which is a whole other story.

Nowadays if you search Google for “Mac auto clicker” you get a confusing mess of results, a mixture of genuine apps, and dubious “free download” sites. At the time of writing, the RapidClick web page is not to be found in Google’s results at all. I’ve somewhat neglected search engine optimisation. However, people seem to find it directly through Mac App Store search, where it now faces a bunch of competitors but manages a steady trickle of sales.

In truth, I’ve always been tempted to kill off my older apps so that I can fully focus on PopClip, which really is the bread and butter of my business. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I am attached to my early apps, especially RapidClick. So, I’m happy to have given it some love and a shiny update for 2021.

Your results may vary with your hardware performance. In my testing, I can get 50 clicks per second on an M1 Mac. On an older Intel mac, it topped out about 30. ↩
I should have done this a long time ago. The crash first came in with macOS Mojave and it has been attracting 1 star reviews for this ever since. I always replied with the instructions to enable Accessibility but it would have been a lot smarter of me to just update the app properly in the first place. ↩
My initial name for it was FarmClick. I renamed it to RapidClick before release. ↩
…which is still the price now. It’s worth noting that before the Mac App Store, apps priced like a coffee weren’t really a thing on the Mac. There was paid indie software, but it tended to be priced higher. ↩

Notes on Scroll Reverser 1.8, and my thoughts on the future of the app

2020-12-09T08:08:59+00:00

We're gonna dark mode like it's 2018.

Last week, I released Scroll Reverser version 1.8. This was its first proper update in 3 years, and features proper Big Sur support, as well as well as fixing a long-standing problem with crashing at startup when lacking required permissions in Mojave and Catalina.

While I was at it, I took the opportunity to add support for Dark Mode and native Apple Silicon.

There’s also an exciting new part of the user interface all about permissions. We all love interacting with the macOS Privacy interface in System Preferences, and now Scroll Reverser guides you helpfully as to what permissions you need to grant.¹

Scroll Reverser's fancy new permissions guidance UI.

The future of Scroll Reverser

When I first wrote Scroll Reverser, almost 10 years ago, I never expected I would still be working on it today.

In February 2011, Apple released the first developer preview of OS X 10.7 Lion to the world. It was the first time any of us had encountered natural scrolling on the Mac. I thought natural scrolling with a trackpad was pretty cool — it made sense to me right away and I wanted to try it out.

The problem was, it was jarring to switch between natural scrolling on my Lion test machine and classic scrolling my main machine, running Snow Leopard. So I decided to put together a tiny little app for my 10.6 Mac to achieve natural scrolling. I called it Scroll Reverser, submitted it to Mac App Store and it was promptly rejected.²

Rather than fight the rejection, I decided to cut my losses and simply posted it to my blog³ that day as a free download, with the source code on GitHub.

To my surprise, Scroll Reverser became an instant hit. Countless Mac websites and forum posts started linking to my Scroll Reverser blog post, and the first week of downloads was in the tens of thousands. I even got my first and only mention on Daring Fireball.⁴

Pretty soon, I started getting emails from people suggesting new features. People wanted to run it on Lion to reverse their trackpad but not their mouse. I also backported Scroll Reverser to work on PowerPC Macs, and on OS X 10.4 Tiger. Now, people could have natural scrolling on their old hardware.

As the years went on, I mainly focused on my other apps (which are how I make my living), but every now and again I would be pulled back to Scroll Reverser. Mainly this involved adding support for each new version of OS X and investigating and solving lots of little weird edge cases and compatibility issues. I also received language localizations from many contributors.⁵

And so, it’s almost 2021 and Scroll Reverser will be 10 years old in a couple of months. Amazingly it is still going strong and still a well used app. I get lots of mail, tweets and GitHub issues about it (especially when it breaks!).

Nick, that was all about the past. What about the future?

For all these years Scroll Reverser has been free. I started accepting donations in 2015.⁶ Although Scroll Reverser languished unloved for the last couple of those years, I have just spent some time updating it and, surprisingly to me, I am full of ideas to improve it further.

I have now made the decision that Scroll Reverser will become a paid app.

What does this mean? Well:

After a future update, Scroll Reverser will operate be default in a trial mode, to be unlocked with a license key.
It will be a one time purchase. NOT a subscription!
Price still to be decided.
The source code will remain open under the Apache 2.0 License, just as it is now.
I will send free license keys to everyone who has ever donated, whatever the amount.
Free license keys also to everyone who has contributed a language translation.
I’m also aware that some people have come to depend on Scroll Reverser and won’t have the means to pay for it, for whatever reason. I will send a free license key to anyone who asks me for it. (I have always done this with my other paid apps too.)

So there is is. I know that an app going from free to paid is the kind of thing that gets some people mad. But I hope most of you will see this as an opportunity to support Scroll Reverser’s development for another 10 years, and beyond.

Nothing is changing immediately, so just carry on as you are for now. This was just a heads-up, really. Thanks to all of you for reading this long post, for sticking with Scroll Reverser over the years, and for all your donations and kind messages of support. It keeps me going.

In macOS 10.13 and earlier, Scroll Reverser didn’t require any permissions at all to work. In 10.14, macOS started requiring the Accessibility permission for apps wanting to set up a scrolling event tap. And macOS 10.15 started requiring the Input Monitoring permission to monitor trackpad gestures. ↩
Actually it took 16 days, but that was very normal back then. You may be interested in the rejection message of 24th March, 2011: We've completed the review of your app, but cannot post this version to the App Store because it did not comply with the App Store Review Guidelines, as detailed below: 2.8 Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected; 6.5 Apps that change the native user interface elements or behaviors of Mac OS X will be rejected. ↩
The original post is preserved here on archive.org. Thanks to a reader who ferreted out this link and sent it to me. ↩
To which I add: where are you now, Scrollvetica? 🙃 ↩
Scroll Reverser is thus available in English, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Romanian, Slovak, Russian, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Polish, Dutch, Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish and Spanish; although, many of the localizations have become incomplete. ↩
Looking at my PayPal records, I have received more than 300 donations, with an average donation of $5. ↩

My apps, macOS Big Sur and Apple Silicon Macs

2020-11-11T17:10:00+00:00

Pilotmoon Software apps + macOS 11.0

Yesterday, Apple announced new Macs based on the new M1 chip (also known as Apple Silicon). These will be ship next week. They also announced that macOS Big Sur would be released on Thursday, November 12th.

I have tested all of my apps¹ running on Big Sur, on both an Intel Mac and an Apple Silicon Mac. This is how things stand:

macOS Big Sur: All shipping versions of my apps will run fine on macOS Big Sur.² There are a couple of minor graphical glitches which I will fix in updates. However in my view none of these would be reason to hold off your upgrade. Expect updates to all of them (some long overdue), but not before the release day.
Apple Silicon / M1 chip: All current shipping versions of my apps are Intel-only. They will seamlessly run on Macs with an M1 chip via the Rosetta 2 emulation layer. I will release Universal versions (that is, for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs) of all my apps in future updates.

If you’re taking the plunge with the new OS, I hope you enjoy it. I’ve found it stable in my testing of the preview builds and it gets a thumbs up from me.

If you run into any problems with my apps on Big Sur or your new M1 chip Mac, please let me know via support@pilotmoon.com.

All of my apps being: PopClip, DwellClick, RapidClick, Dropshelf and Scroll Reverser. ↩
Even Scroll Reverser, which had major unresolved troubles on Catalina, seems to be a lot better on Big Sur, as far as I can tell so far. ↩

Release notes for PopClip 2020.10

2020-11-03T09:05:00+00:00

Last week I released PopClip 2020.10, which is now live as an update on the Mac App Store and as an in-app update in the standalone (website download) edition.

It’s a simple “bugfixes and improvements” update, so I’ll just repeat the changelog entry:

Fix crash when activating certain extensions (Select All, Formatting, Highlight, Delete, and Paste and Enter).

Full support for Microsoft Edge browser.

Improve compatibility with apps: iTerm2, BBEdit, UltraEdit, SecureCRT.

Feel free to report any bugs, make suggestions, or just say hi, via support@pilotmoon.com.

If you would like to show your support for PopClip, please consider adding a positive rating or review for this version on the Mac App Store. Ratings feed into the app store ranking algirithm, so just by clicking that rating¹ button you will be directly helping me.

Presuming it’s a 5★, naturally 🙃. If you’re not inclined to give a good review, I’d much prefer you shoot me an email. I’m currently very responsive to the email inbox, so if you contacted me earlier in the year and didn’t get a response, try me again. ↩

Reflections on all this

2020-03-11T12:00:00+00:00

Matthew (left) and me (right), October 1987.

I don’t usually make personal posts¹, but today is an exception.

In February I lost my younger brother, Matthew, very suddenly and unexpectedly.

My energy has of course has gone into the family situation, and this has meant I have not devoted time to my business here, fixing bugs, updating extensions, and answering queries. So I would like to apologise to customers who have been waiting for fixes or responses and not got them yet, and I thank you for your patience.

Further, in recent weeks I have had chance to reflect on life, purpose, responsibility, legacy… and also the intersection of these things with the reality of being an independent software developer.

As you may or not know, I work alone, without any business partners or employees. This is the way I have chosen it — a business with a responsibility for others’ livelihoods is a very different proposition to something you can do on your own. Of course, this means that one day, I won’t be here either and you will all might be left with an app that doesn’t update any more.²

That said, I don’t expect to disappear any time soon. I get a lot of pleasure from keeping these creations of mine on the road through the ever changing environment of OS updates, app store rule changes, the ever changing world of 3rd party apps to remain compatible with, and everything else that comes along to throw a little challenge on the way.

I guess the point of this post is just to say — hi this is me. I’m just a human being. I enjoy coming up with ideas and turning them into software that does a thing in a neat, quiet way. I like getting your support emails with your ideas and hearing how the stuff I made is useful to you. I am frequently overwhelmed with the amount of things that need to be fixed, or could be improved.

It’s a constant battle to not get bogged down and disheartened in the inbox and the ever-growing todo list of maintenance tasks, and to instead actually carve out undistracted time to really build things.³

This is my only job; my sole (modest) living comes from people like you buying my apps. As a process it’s messy, it’s imprecise and I really can never make any promises. But I will keep on trying to figure it all out. Thank you.

Indeed for the first 10 years of running this business I didn’t make posts at all, having only started this blog at the end of 2019. ↩
Perhaps I will put in place something between now and then to allow my creations to continue beyond me. What form that might take, is for another day. ↩
One of the reasons for this new blog, and other planned improvements to the website, is to communicate better with you the customers what’s going on with my apps, and what you should do when you encounter something that doesn’t work. That’s still very much a work in progress. ↩

Release notes for PopClip 2019.10

2019-11-05T16:45:00+00:00

PopClip 2019.10 is now available from my website. This update fixes several common bugs and is recommended for all users.

Please note: at the time of writing, this update is not yet available in the Mac App Store. It is taking longer than usual to progress though App Review. A standalone (non-MAS) edition is available for all customers to download directly from my website here: Download PopClip.¹

This update includes the following fixes:

No more seeing double.

Avoid duplicate actions sometimes appearing in the PopClip bar.
Avoid unintentional “auto copy” where PopClip could fail to restore the original clipboard contents after selecting text.
PopClip will now better avoid appearing in non-text situations (such as graphics editing and games).
A freezing bug that could happen when activating the Search action, or using extensions in a browser.
Exclude PopClip from apps running under Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion and Crossover.
In text editors, avoid incorrect text being pasted when the user presses Command-V immediately after selecting text.

In addition, the following changes:

PopClip will no longer automatically copy the text to the clipboard when using Search or Open Link. This reverts back to v1.5.8 behaviour. If you want the copying behaviour, this can now be enabled via hidden preferences with the following shell commands:²
- defaults write com.pilotmoon.popclip CopyOnSearch -bool YES
- defaults write com.pilotmoon.popclip CopyOnOpenLink -bool YES
Added a hidden preference to make PopClip’s button highlight remain blue, whatever your macOS accent colour setting.
- defaults write com.pilotmoon.popclip ClassicBlue -bool YES

Enjoy PopClip and keep in touch.

For Mac App Store customers, the transition to the website edition should be seamless. It will detect and honour your Mac App Store purchase receipt, and all your settings and extensions will be preserved. The only significant difference is that future updates are delivered through an in-app updater instead of via the MAS. ↩
Quit PopClip, paste and enter the command in Terminal, then restart PopClip. ↩

macOS Catalina

2019-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Apple released macOS 10.15 Catalina this week. All current versions of my paid apps are compatible with it, as far as I can tell.¹ Please let me know if you run in to any difficulties.

If you use the Alfred, Fantastical, TaskPaper, Messages, Notes or ReadingList extensions, you’ll need to download updated versions of those extensions (by clicking the links in this sentence).²

Personally, I’m holding off on the upgrade on my main machine. I think it could do with a couple of point releases to iron things out.³

My free app, Scroll Reverser, has some difficuties and is in need of an update. ↩
Updated 16 Oct 2019 to add more extensions to the list. ↩
By contrast, I found Mojave very stable through the beta period and upgraded immediately on release. ↩

Bug: PopClip may hang when activating Search

2019-09-28T17:17:00+00:00

I’m receiving occasional reports of PopClip freezing up when activating the Search action, and when using certain PopClip extensions. This affects version 2019.9 and 2019.9.1.

One star.

Thanks to a customer who emailed me at support@pilotmoon.com and assisted with debugging, I am making progress with diagnosing the problem.¹ ~~I will continue to work on a fix, and I will update this blog post with more information.~~

Update, 29 Sep 2019: Another customer reported that deleting and reinstalling PopClip made the problem go away.

Update, 31 Oct 2019: The bug seems to be because PopClip is waiting for macOS to ask permission to automate the target. But macOS is not actually showing the permission request dialog. For the fix, I have attempted to mitigate this by calling the permission request on a background thread, to avoid locking up the app, and adding a timeout to abort waiting for permission if none is granted in a reasonable time. The fix is now in ~~the latest beta version~~ PopClip 2019.10.

Here is a video showing the problem, thanks to my helpful customer (posted with permission):

For anyone interested, it’s AEDeterminePermissionToAutomateTarget() locking up. ↩