Browse Tag: Mac Apps

All Mac Apps are now 64 Bit

Over the last year, we have been making several tweaks to our Mac Apps and at the beginning of 2016, we successfully compiled and listed all our non-PDF based apps to 64 Bit. Last week, we submitted 64 Bit version of the last four applications, Batch TIFF & PDF Converter, CM TIFF 2 PDF, CM PDF & TIFF Page Extractor and CM PDF Merge NX to the Mac App Store and they have been approved and now listed on the App Store.

With that, all our applications on the three platform, Mac, Windows and iOS applications are now available in 64 Bit versions.

As all our Mac Applications are supported on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and above, we have discontinued the 32 Bit support with that release.

Batch TIFF & PDF Converter is Live

We have just got word from Apple that Batch TIFF & PDF Converter is now live on the Mac App Store.

This application is includes all the best features from all our PDF and TIFF tools we have listed on the Mac App Store which gives you an all-on-one platform to simplify all your TIFF and PDF needs.

Batch TIFF & PDF Converter

Although this application is called Batch TIFF & PDF Converter, like most of our applications, they do more than just converting between TIFF and PDF and vice versa. The inclusion of Page Ranges which we perfected on Batch TIFF Resizer is a powerful feature which will allow you to rearrange, extract, insert and remove pages from your TIFF or PDF documents. It gives you all the control needed to perform the task through a simple to understand interface. We are all familiar with Page Ranges in the context of Printing where you can select which page of the documents to print and we just brought that same simplicity in this tool.

An example of page range can be sum up in this simple line. Say that you have 10 pages in your document and you need to remove page 4 and swap the order of page 6 and 7. The Page Range will look like 1-3,5,7-6,8-10 . It’s as simple as that.

Page Extraction will allow you to extract one or more pages in the document for distribution instead of having to offer the entire document. The extracted pages can be saved as a TIFF, PDF, PNG or even a JPG file.

Inserting pages can be a life-saver especially when a page or more is missing from the document and you will not need to recreate the entire TIFF or PDF file. All you need to do is use Batch TIFF & PDF Converter to insert that page or file in for you. It supports inserting TIFF, PDF, PNG and JPG files.

Removing pages is the opposite of inserting and can be equally useful when certain pages are not ready for distribution.

Apart from those core features, Batch TIFF & PDF Converter supports adding of Text Captions to the pages. This can be done on the 9 computed points on the page and not only that you can determine which page you want the text captions to be on. A text caption in this case can be your copyright tag.

It also supports page resizing to reduce the page size and thus document size.

For PDF files, it supports working on both password protected and non password protected file. When it first loads the file to the list, it will evaluate if the file is password protected and if so, will prompt you to enter the password. This is only done at the beginning of the session. Obviously, this application will also offer you the ability to password protect your PDF file and determine which permissions such as Copying, Printing and Annotation support.

Batch TIFF & PDF Converter is a robust tool which is modelled around our Batch TIFF Resizer for Windows. This application is used by legal firms, architectural firms and any organization and individuals who would need to work with TIFF or PDF files on a regular basis.

Batch TIFF & PDF Converter retails for US$29.99 and is available exclusively on the Mac App Store at

Page Ranges Support in our Mac Apps

We are progressively adding support for Page Ranges support to our existing Mac Apps wherever practical. The Page Ranges support will enable you the ability to determine how the pages in your TIFF and PDF files will be arranged.

In the past month, we have added supported for Page Ranges in

  1. CM PDF & TIFF Page Extractor
  2. CM ComboTIFF
  3. CM PDF Merge NX

We hope that this new feature will enable you to perform your work even more efficiently.

Do let us know what features you like to see in our applications and we will do our best to include them in future updates.

 

New PDF Engine for Mac Apps

We understand that there is a fundamental design flaw with the current built-in Mac OS X PDF Engine which we are currently employing which stores all PDF pages in memory prior to saving them. When converting large number of TIFF images or pages to PDF, the application may run out of usable memory and thus either crashes or you get a resultant PDF file with missing or malformed pages. This issue only affects PDF files with more than 100 pages.

Currently, we are exploring an alternative solution which does a more efficient method of memory management. This will result in writing all converted PDF pages to file and thus does not result in huge memory usage. The advantage is that it can handle unlimited number of pages and thus allow PDF Files to be over the 2gb file limit. However, when working in file mode, this would result in a slightly slower processing speed.

As the App Store would no longer be accepting any updates for the week while it shuts down, we should have the solution available for CM TIFF TO PDF and CM Page Extractor at the beginning of January 2012.

We apologized for the inconvenience caused.

Trial Version for Mac

We announced that we have gone exclusively on the Mac App Store for all our Mac Apps so as to streamline the development and to harness the “App Store Only” features for our apps.

We however received emails from potential customers who want to try before buying our apps. As we have pretty much cleared the bulk of the development for the OS X Lion compatibility and Cocoa transition, we are looking at offering the option to download a trial copy of our apps from our website and also to option to purchase them off our site instead of the Mac App Store.

However, in line with the new development, the minimum specification would be an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6. The updates would be made within 72 hours of the release at the App Store. This will allow us to align the version on both the Mac App Store and on our website.

The Mac App Store does provide us with the opportunity to offer our apps to a wider audience but several shortcomings with face on the App Store is the lack of personal contact with our customer base and the obvious lack of the ability to offer trial versions.

We certainly want to minimize disappointed customers and be able to offer you the opportunity to try the app before purchasing them either on the App Store or our site.

Stay Tune. We should probably be able to finalize this before the end of the 2011.

Help File issue with Sandboxing

It appears that with the Sandboxing requirement from Apple, it appears that the PDF Help File can no longer be launched from within the Application Bundle. There appears to be a permission issue with Preview as does not have the permission to view files from within the bundle.

For the time being, You could view or download the PDF Help File from our website at https://www.batchimage.com/support/help-files .

We have updated all our Mac Apps so that it would download the copy of the PDF Help File directly from our website. We hope to get this update to you as soon as they get approved by Apple.

We apologized for the inconvenience caused.

Mac Apps and Lion

Over the last several months, we have been working hard in the background to cater to the changes which OS X 10.7 Lion introduced and subsequently the Sandboxing requirements of the App Store.

For the Lion Compatibility, we had to change the underlying framework from Carbon to Cocoa. Some of the visible changes which were implemented are the Full Screen Support and the ability to resize from all sides of the apps. However during the transition, some of the features may not work the same as before or suddenly stop working. We are in the midst of ironing out all the reported issues.

The Sandboxing requirements is a little more complex. The concept of Sandboxing is a nice idea as it means that any application must work within the boundary of a virtual sandbox and would not be allowed to access files or devices outside the sandbox. This means that apps which are sandboxed would not be able access any files without the user’s explicit permission and intervention. Basically for a file to be accessed, the user would need to select the file(s) and to save the output, the user would need to select the location to save the files in. The heightened permissions would only be active for as long as the app is running. Once shut down, the app would lose this permissions and the user would need to reselect the files and folders again. The only files the app can handle are within the sandbox which are files stored separately from what the user can access. The only time the app can handle external user files are when the users explicitly grant the permissions.

Our CM Note Keeper stores your notes in a database which used to exist in the ~/Library/Application Support/ folder. This was the requirement set up by Apple but with Lion, all the database would need to be located in the user’s Containers folder. To reduce the inconvenience to our users, when you first run the app in OS X Lion, the app would move the database into the sandbox container. You could still Backup and Restore the database to an external folder.

Before all these get too confusing, what this means to our users is that we can no longer implement the “Save In Directory” option as the permission to save to that folder would no longer be granted to the apps without having the user re-select that folder. So for our Lion users, this means that you will need to reselect the “Save In Directory” before you hit the “Process All” button. For CM Note Keeper, it means that the “Auto Save” option would no longer work. We understand your frustration but we will certainly monitor the development from Apple and once they allow us to handle this as it was, we will definitely implement it.

We have submitted all our apps with the said Sandboxing requirement ahead of November 2011. This will allow us to refine the apps along the way so that the transition would be transparent to our customers.

We understand that these changes brings about issues to our users and we apologized for the inconvenience caused as we understand the number of negative reviews left on the App Store. We will be addressing them as soon as we can. If you do encounter any issues, please drop us an email and we will have the issue fixed.

Thank you once again for your patience.

Our Mac Apps works on OS X Lion (10.7)

We are pleased to announce that our Mac Apps –

– CM Note Keeper
– CM Batch Photo Resizer
– CM PDF Page Extractor
– CM TIFF to PDF
– ComboTIFF
– CM Sort List

works on the latest OS X Lion.

There are several minor cosmetic issues which we would address in the coming updates.

With the launch of OS X Lion, we have decided to consolidate all sales of our Mac Apps exclusively on the Mac App Store. This will allow us to offer Lion only features in the near future.

Issue with Registration Keys and Mac Apps

We just found out that the Registration System which we used for our Mac App does not appear to work with our Cocoa Build of our apps.

As such, we are suspending all sales of our Mac App through our website. This issues does not affect App Sold on the Mac App Store. Please continue to purchase through the Mac App Store.

We apologized for the inconvenience caused.

We made a Boo-Boo with the Mac Apps

First off, we would like to apologize to our mac users as we made a big issue with the Mac installer. We basically used the same packaging app as the apps for the Mac App Store and that causes them not to work under the normal installation.

Basically what happened is when you install it, you get the white circle and the slash symbol over the app and it tells you that your computer cannot run it.

We have since corrected the issue and if you were affected by the problem, you will need to trash your initial installation and install a fresh copy from our website again.

This should not be something which should happen but it did and it is certainly our fault and there is no one to pass the blame to.