Synergy Advance 0.4 review

Synergy Advance is a powerful iTunes accessory written from scratch to take advantage of the technologies behind Apple's new Tiger operating system (although it also runs on Panther).

License: Demo OS: Mac OS X File size: 3093K Developer: Wincent Colaiuta Buy Now Price: $12.00 Updated: 18 Aug 2006

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Synergy Advance is a powerful iTunes accessory written from scratch to take advantage of the technologies behind Apple's new Tiger operating system (although it also runs on Panther). The core module provides a powerful hot key engine, Global Menu, and Growl integration, and works seamlessly alongside Synergy Classic. Future preview releases will provide some of the functionality already available in Synergy Classic as well as new features enabled by the new architecture.

What's New:
[Feature] Fulfilled feature request #298 ("Option to do 'play' and 'pause', but never 'playpause'"); in addition to the requested option (now available in the "Advanced" tab of the preferences, another option has also been added to determine how iTunes works out the current player status (either by asking iTunes or by inferring it from the last known state). See the documentation for the two new options: "Prefer 'play' and 'pause' over 'playpause'" and "Infer player state rather than querying iTunes".
[Enhancement] Optimizations to time-to-string formatting code.
[Enhancement] Increased resolution of internal track progress measurement (using floating point arithmetic instead of integers).
[Enhancement] Extensive optimizations to the Dock icon animation and update code to reduce the number of expensive compositing operations.
[Enhancement] Improvements to robustness of singleton implementation (in a multi-threaded context).
[Enhancement] Version check results are now logged to the console (depending on the "Logging level" setting in the "Advanced" tab of the preferences).
[Bugfix] Fixed a known issue wherein automatic version checks were not performed (although manual checks worked).
[Bugfix] Fixed bug #394 ("Unwanted playlist switching on play/pause").
[Bugfix] Fixed non-proportional scaling of non-square album art in the Dock icon.
[Bugfix] Eliminated the "NSPortDelegateTickler" (bug #388) crash on PowerPC and the related "CFRunLoopDoObservers" (bug #397) crash on Intel that could occur intermittently if Synergy Advance was left running for many hours.
[Bugfix] Limit the number of threads spawned at launch time and when iTunes is not responding to Apple Events (for example, when it has its preferences window open); this was actually the intended behaviour all along but the previous implementation didn't conform to the design.
[Bugfix] Fixed bug #393 ("Hidden Dock icon preference not honoured when upgrading").
[Bugfix] Removed sheet offering to restart Synergy Advance after attempting (and failing) to make changes to Dock icon visibility when running from a write-protected volume.
[Bugfix] Fixed bug #391 ("Growl notifications not sent when using Synergy Advance to change ratings").
[Bugfix] Fixed bug #398 ("Partial Spanish and English localizations swapped in Registration preference pane").
[Note] Added documentation for new advanced preferences added in version 0.4: "Override default Apple Event timeout" and "Apple Event timeout". Also added missing documentation for the "Hide iTunes on launch if launched by Synergy Advance" option in the "Advanced" tab of the preferences.
[Note] The "Disable Synergy Advance hot keys when iTunes is not running" option previously in the "Advanced" tab of the preferences has been moved to the "Hot Keys" tab and renamed. It now appears as a secondary checkbox underneath the "Enable Hot Keys" checkbox and is labelled "Only when iTunes is running".