Helium Foot Software

Making your Mac more agile, more powerful and more fun

July 2009

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About

Helium Foot Software develops MercuryMover: Don't let the mouse slow you down! Move and resize windows on your Mac with the keyboard.

Highbrow 1.0 Public Beta

Where Keith puts out his sophomore product

[Highbrow]

After a three week sprint, Highbrow 1.0 beta is away! Since the app was mostly finished a few weeks ago, i figured that this release would have come sooner. I had forgotten how much work it is to launch a new product! With a groovy new icon, a very decent help file, a nice custom Sparkle based auto-update, a pretty (though currently troublesome) disk image, a web page, a homepage redesign, a screen movie, some wordsmithing, a press release, and i'm sure a few other things that i've forgotten and we've made it to the beta release. If you ever use more than one web browser on your Mac, either at the same time, or in serial, you definitely owe it to yourself to try Highbrow. For me, all of the annoyances of using that second (and third) browser have completely disappeared now that Highbrow automatically changes my system wide default browser on the fly as i move from one browser to the next.

Do you feel some web browser frustration? Get your Mac web browser zen with Highbrow. Look for the v1.0 release on 15 December 2008.

Posted by kalperin at 20:44 | Comments (5)

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Comments

Re: Highbrow 1.0 Public Beta

Is there any plans on making this a Preference Pane? It would make configuring the list of browsers much easier if there were a list box with checkboxes instead of a menu that has to be pulled down for each application.

Also, my menubar is already past a point where it's getting covered up by application menus, so yet another menubar application really makes things difficult.

Love the concept of the app and I'm looking forward to seeing how this one evolves.

Posted by: Dave M. at December 04,2008 07:52

Re: Highbrow 1.0 Public Beta

Hi Dave, thanks for the feedback! I definitely hear you on both points. The browser list management is pretty goofy and is ripe for a better UI. Look for something better in a future release. I do think that a big selling point of Highbrow is that it is so easy to change the behavior. If you had to open system prefs each time you wanted to change your preferred browser then that would sort of be a pain. Additionally, it's nice to be able to see what your current browser is at all times. On the second point, once Highbrow is registered, it will generally only display the icon of the current browser. The only time that Highbrow will display any text is when you have selected "Automatically check for updates" and there is a new update available.

Thanks for trying it out, i hope that you continue to enjoy it!

Posted by: kalperin at December 04,2008 21:41

Re: Highbrow 1.0 Public Beta

Any chance of being able to set it up to route to different browsers automatically based on URL? For example, if I know that pages on a foo.com tend to work better in one browser over another, it'd be great if I could tell Highbrow to automatically route those URLs to that browser, while automatically routing the others to my preferred browser.

Posted by: Eric Shepherd at December 05,2008 13:43

Re: Highbrow 1.0 Public Beta

Eric, that's a terrific idea! This isn't something that would be in the upcoming v1.0 version but we'll keep it in mind for future releases.

Posted by: kalperin at December 06,2008 21:53

Re: Highbrow 1.0 Public Beta

I would definitely like to see the ability to open URLs with different browsers. At the moment the 10.5.6 update to Safari has broken access to my online banking, so it would be great to be able to switch to Firefox automatically for that particular URL.

Posted by: Karen Hughes at December 23,2008 07:24