[stinkblog]

Just in case there were any questions, our most recent release of TubeSock work great with OS X 10.5 Leopard. The biggest issue we had was a GUI bug, where the preview display would not appear. This also happened to 10.4 users who ran the Safari 3 beta. We went ahead and adopted the non-metallic window style (using a 10.4-compatible method) a couple of releases ago. And truth be told, I always hated the brushed metal look.

The Stinkbot LLC support staff doubled in size yesterday, with the addition of Ryan Collins. Ryan is a student at NCSU studying computer science. He also shares my interest in airplanes, although to his credit he’s not nearly as gaga over the entire line of Cirrus products as I am. Welcome, Ryan!

I know that support has been spotty for the past two weeks. For anyone affected by this, please accept my humblest apologies. I had no idea how difficult support would be after the baby arrived–I seriously thought I could do it all. No doubt this is just the first of many lessons about my limitations.

Ryan and I are going through the database of support requests, and we’re going to make sure (a) every email gets a response and (b) every issue gets resolved. If you have an open issue in our system, feel free to check up on it via the FogBugz URL, and also feel free to update the case and give us more info or simply demand more attention.

Hey lardass! I see you’re working out with your new iPhone! So, what’ll you do if the old ticker kicks and you’ve only got three hand motions left before you black out? Not such a cool phone now, is it? Hmmm?

Yeah, we thought of that. Here’s a one-click dialer for emergencies — just poke the button and you’ll be talking to the fuzz. Seriously, don’t press the button unless you want to be talking to 911. You have to press the button a second time to confirm, but it’ll call right after that. To cancel, press the Home button.

Note: to use this, you’ll need to know how to install third party software on your iPhone. Update: Ste said he’ll add this to his source feed, so you should be able to use Installer.app to install it directly on your iPhone. You can get Installer here.

TubeSock 2.0.3 has gone final, with improvements to iPhone, iPod, and appleTV conversions. You can grab a copy at the usual place.

However, we have gotten two reports of iPhone videos conversions showing up as all black (a bug we fixed in 2.0.3) for videos that we ourselves have successfully watched on the iPhone. So either (a) something weird happened in the universe and computer programs are no longer deterministic, or (b) there’s a deeper issue. Both videos converted in the 690kbit/sec range, so it’s possible the problem is that the bitrate cutoff is not 700kbit/sec but a hair lower. We’re looking into it!

We cranked out a bunch of action-items on TubeSock for Mac today. Here’s the list of things we fixed:

• Improved compression profiles for iPhone, iPod, Mac, and AppleTV — this solves the “this file can’t be played on this iPhone” message that many users had been seeing
• Support for Unicode filenames with “Add to iTunes”
• Finally fixed that lingering barber pole/progress bar issue
• Detects formats it can’t decode (i.e. On2) and displays an appropriate message (so far, we’ve seen no On2 files in the wild, but we’re ready)
• Fixed an issue caused by YouTube using the Google video cache
• Added support for 2-pass encoding. Yes! Awesome! And then, after seeing it made no difference, we removed it.

You can download the latest beta release right here.

Since our iPhone post below went live, several users sent us links for videos that weren’t working with the iPhone. (I guess, in retrospect, our guesses weren’t that great after all.) With an actual iPhone in hand we were able to fine-tune the conversion, and it appears that everything is now well. Every video we’ve tried, including the problematic ones submitted by users, now convert, copy to iPhone, and play without trouble.

We’re calling this a beta until we’ve had time to give it a full test. You can download the beta here.

TubeSock for Mac 2.0.2 is here! This release fixes the disappearing preview bug (caused by last week’s Apple Security Update 2007-006). Also, the vocal minority who complained about our use of brushed metal will be pleased to learn that the fix involved moving to a “unified” interface look. Yessir, we’re Leopard-ready! Well, at least from a GUI perspective.

Also, support for recently-introduced “international” YouTube URLs (such as http://uk.youtube.com) has been added. This should solve the “too many redirects” error that some users have been seeing.

And finally, we haven’t finished figuring out the new DailyMotion system, but we’ve improved the error handling. If TubeSock runs into trouble, we now display a nice message explaining the situation.

Download your copy now!

It’s true — videos converted with TubeSock are working fine on the iPhone. The blind guess about format and bitrate we made back in January seems to have panned out! If you encounter any problems, let us know.

If you’re outside the US and using the international YouTube URLs, this new 2.0.2 alpha version of TubeSock for Mac fixes the URL issue.

It looks like TubeSock for Mac’s URL scanners don’t recognize the new international flavors of YouTube. We’re on it.

(TubeSock for Windows seems to like them just fine. So in the past two days, the Mac and Windows versions each dodge a bullet the other caught. Perhaps there’s finally one benefit to a non-shared codebase?)