Unsanity urges customers to make sure APE is current before upgrading to Leopard

Not all Leopard upgrades have gone as smoothly as hoped, which is not unexpected (and why we always back up before upgrading, right? Right.) and not necessarily cause for enormous alarm. One frequent alert, however, has been the implication of Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE) framework in some upgrade problems. APE has a long and sometimes controversial history, with some developers swearing BY it (Audio Hijack, for example, uses APE to enable the "Instant Hijack" functionality) and other developers swearing AT it (APE's ability to modify other applications at runtime, necessary to enable some tools, can also make app debugging more difficult).

We relayed an early warning on APE (8:31 pm Friday) as part of Scott's liveblog of his Leopard upgrade, but without confirmation from the developer there wasn't much more to say... until now. Rosyna of Unsanity sent out an urgent email alert to mailing list subscribers (reproduced in whole below) recommending that APE be updated to the current version (2.03) prior to upgrading to Leopard, lest badness ensue. Note that v2.03 of APE still won't actually do anything under Leopard, which knocks out a large slice of utility functionality, but it won't crash either.

In general, if you are doing an upgrade install, I recommend an AppFresh or VersionTracker pass to make sure that all your bits and pieces are as current as they can be. Plus, that backup... don't skip it. Really.

Thanks Laurie!
---- from Unsanity's customer mailing list ---

We wanted to send out some information to our mailing list subscribers about Mac OS X 10.5 and Unsanity's Application Enhancer.

First and formost. *Before* you install Mac OS X 10.5, make sure you have Application Enhancer (APE) 2.0.3 or later installed. You can download it from http://www.unsanity.net/ape-203.dmg (the webpage is at http://unsanity.com/haxies/ape ).

Make *sure* you have APE 2.0.3 or later installed *before* you install Mac OS X 10.5. If you have an earlier version of APE installed before you install 10.5, you may exhibit one of the following symptoms upon booting into Mac OS X 10.5:

- Your goldfish may die.
- A strange dog might bite you on the street.
- A friend may punch you.
- Your computer may catch fire.
- Your loved one may leave you.

All of these things are really bad. So we urge everyone to make sure they have APE 2.0.3 or later installed. If you aren't sure, install APE 2.0.3 or later from the link above. APE 2.0.3 was released on March 14th, 2007. And please, always keep your software up to date.

A note about 10.5 and haxies:

As long as you have APE 2.0.3, nothing bad will happen in 10.5. Well, nothing we can control. However, none of your APE Modules will work either.

Developers in Apple's Mac OS X developer program (ADC) got the final 10.5 GM yesterday. We are still downloading the huge 6.66GB image and as soon as the downloads finish for our developers, we will be hard at work on making our software work on 10.5.

You can keep up to date with the status of haxies and 10.5 by viewing http://unsanity.com/products/compatibility/ and we will post more information as we have it on our blog at http://unsanity.org/ . Mac OS X 10.5 compatibility is currently our number one priority.

"If APE doesn't work in 10.5, shouldn't I just uninstall it?"

No, you should not. Just make sure you have APE 2.0.3 or later. A lot of third party (and Unsanity made) utilities depend on the APE framework itself being there. As it has some extremely useful functions. Removing it may cause these Applications and/or preference panes to stop launching.

For more information on Unsanity haxies, please visit:

http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/


Unsanity LLC is the creator of other popular haxies such as WindowShade X, ShapeShifter, FontCard, Mighty Mouse, Menu Master, FruitMenu, Xounds, Dock Detox, and Silk. Unsanity is dedicated to providing quality software for the Macintosh community.


-Rosyna of the Unsanity Team
Always needs a hug
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