→ Home Zone beta 7 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

Beta 7 speeds up bluetooth scans (it now only recognizes paired devices, though) and adds the new application icon, which has been designed by Louis. Under the hood, a new action plugin architecture has been implemented. I will post instructions on how to create actions in a few days, but you can always send in ideas, suggestions or concrete Applescripts or shell scripts so I can make an action of them.

Posted in Home Zone | 4 Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 6.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

Based on all feedback, I fixed some crashes and improved handling of some airport network names. Let me know if you still find something that’s not working right so I can further stabilize the core.

On the new features front, I’m working on a new action plugin architecture that allows users to develop their own actions using AppleScript or Objective-C. This way, actions can be created, added and updated easier.

Also, Louis has created a terrific icon that will be released together with the new interface, which is in draft stage right now. Thanks, Louis.

To everyone who offered me to donate something so far: Thanks alot! This is a public beta right now, and will most likely be shareware when it’s final. I appreciate your help, but you might want to save your pennies for the final release.

Posted in Home Zone | 8 Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 6 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

Yesterdays beta 5 was admittedly a bit brittle, so everyone who experienced problems, please download the new release. Things that should work better now include:

• Greyed out menu items
• Empty dropdown box
• Sudden quitting, problems when restarting – you may have to restart your Mac once, though.

No new features, sorry.

Posted in Home Zone | 22 Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 5 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

Please delete the file PersistentStore.xml at ~/Library/Application Support/Home Zone/ in your home directory.

Beta 5 changes the way that Home Zone scans for available Airport networks. First, you can set a custom scan interval in the new preferences dialog. The Airport scan interval is pretty short (5 seconds by default), but Home Zone performs a full broadcast (which leads to the short performance hits Stefan reported) only every tenth scan (and immediately after launch and waking up, so you’re up to date). Also, you can now specify that a trigger should only recognise an Airport network when you’re actually connected to that network, and you can enter one or more base station IDs (BSSIDs) so the trigger will only recognize the network when your base station has one of these BSSIDs. If you only have triggers that recognise connected Airport networks, Home Zone will skip the full broadcast scan altogether (except after launch and wake), so if you encounter wireless performance problems, switch all your triggers to “connected” only.

Also new in this release:

• You can force-enable or -disable zones via the status bar menu of each zone. By default, Home Zone will reset your override when the zone changes its state, but you can disable that in the preferences
• New action: Immediately start the screen saver
• The open file/URL action has been improved to support AppleScript files (.scpt) and executable files; if you want to run a shell script there, make sure it’s executable
• You can specify that a zone should be considered active if none of its triggers are active. This seems illogical, but it’s nice when you want to define an inverse zone, like “Not at home”.
• New icon and website

Transforming this into a Preferences Pane will be tricky for several reasons, though. The interface (which is really cluttered right now, I hope to change that at least a bit) is just too big. Maybe I just leave it like it is.

I’ll look into supporting more triggers next, like the reachability of a certain computer/router/IP and maybe make the actions interface easier to handle (sorting actions would be useful, too).

Posted in Home Zone | 8 Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 4 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

• Detects hidden, but paired Bluetooth devices
• Setting system volume actions
• Now also checks immediately after waking up
• Availability icons in status bar menu

I’ll try and see how this can be made a system preferences panel, which would probably be a good idea.

Posted in Home Zone | 13 Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 3 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

• Growl support has been added. See the Growl system preferences panel to configure what messages will be posted.
• An action for changing network locations has been added
• An action for locking all keychains has been added
• An action for opening arbitrary files, applications or URLs has been added
• Bluetooth device discovery has been improved
• Added update check functionality (thanks to Sparkle)

Oh, and you might want to push this a little:

Posted in Home Zone | 3 Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 2

Thanks for your feedback on the first beta. Today I made Home Zone a lot more flexible:

• You can define enter and leave actions for multiple zones, which can be triggered my multiple networks (all of them or any of them)
• You can enter custom ESSID names to get your invisible Airport network working (I guess you’ll have to be connected to that network to enable that zone, though)
• You can select bluetooth devices as a zone trigger (only visible devices, I’ll see if I can support invisible but paired devices)
• Home Zone will leave all zones when terminating, thereby re-enabling your password no matter what networks are visible.

As always, I appreciate your feedback. There’s obviously room for adding lots of cool actions now (besides enabling or disabling the screen saver password) or refining the zone triggers (like checking the MAC address of the AP) and several other things… stay tuned.

The refresh interval is 15 seconds for Airport networks and 60 seconds for Bluetooth devices, BTW (check the small spinner in the configuration window). Oh, and the log window shows you when triggers and zones become (un-)available, so make sure to check this if something goes wrong.

Posted in Home Zone | 9 Comments »

Taking your MacBook with you wherever you go is convenient and makes you look good, but it’s also potentially dangerous. Anyone could just grab your notebook and play around with it when you don’t pay attention. That’s why someone invented the screen saver password lock (and FileVault), which keeps prying eyes away from your precious data. But back home, it can be quite annoying. Leave your notebook to get a beer from the fridge, come back, type your password. Over and over… (one beer doesn’t get you through the evening, does it?). Can’t your Mac notice that you’re home and turn off the password protection?

It can! Home Zone does exactly this, provided you got an Airport network at home. It lets you select any wireless network name, switches off password protection when this wireless network is available and switches protection back on when you’re back on the road.

Note that this is a beta release, though. I hacked this together in less than an hour this afternoon to solve the problem I described above, but there might be improvements that would make it work better for you. I totally appreciate your feedback here. I’m already thinking about letting the user define more that just one trusted network, maybe also using the proximity of Bluetooth devices and doing more than just switching the password protection on and off – user definable actions would be pretty cool, I think.

Oh, and I’d really love it if someone did a decent icon for this… my icon design skills are pretty bad, as you can see.

Posted in Home Zone | 11 Comments »

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of Aurora 3.2.3, which includes the following new features:

• A brand-new chinese localization (thanks to Jack M. H. Lin)
• If your Mac falls asleep while you’re snoozing, it will now wake up properly and continue playing music

Also, I’m planning for a new major release, Aurora 4, so if there’s something that you’d really like to see in that release, please let me know (RadioShark users, I already heard you).

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Posted in Aurora | 12 Comments »