Regular readers of our blog will have noticed the unusual envelop of silence that has descended upon the comings and goings of our little workshop lately.
Indeed, we are rather absorbed in work on FL 2.0 and our social life is mostly limited to our bugtracking system.
Still, it’s now the beginning of March and we had to realize we owe some updates.
Hello People,
BinaryNights is looking to recruite some extra hands for the pre-beta tests of ForkLift 2.0.
The app is still a long way (months) from complete, but we’re ready with some basic parts that we want tested in as many ways as possible.
Needless to say, we’re primarily looking for expert users with exceptionally acute observational capabilities, but also people who rely heavily on specific features and can provide some insight into optimizing workflow.
If you feel you can help us in the coming weeks please send us your forum user name to supportATbinarynightsDOTcom, and tell us in a few words what are your primary uses for ForkLift.
This pre-Beta is still a closed test, so you must be aware that everything you learn during the test period is confidential.
Good nights everyone
Holiday season and all, we’ve kept long and busy nights for the past weeks, all for the public good, so we can give an optimistic kickoff to this new year with a new service update.
But we’re not going to give it to you without a speech first, because we want to share with you a short look back at last year, the excitement we feel towards the next 
2009 has been an incredibly busy year, I guess for everyone, but certainly so for us. It new seems incredible that just 12 months ago we were in the runup of releasing ForkLift 1.6.
This was the release that introduced the great new UI and workflow that made ForkLift the synonym for cutting edge file manipulation on OS X Leopard, or so I hear.
Halfway into the year arrived ForkLift 1.7, our Coming of Age release. With the new major features of folder synchronization, folder merge, and terminal access added in this version, ForkLift finally became the application we all had visioned when we started out in 2007.
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The headline being, in this case, a reference to the more mundane act of collecting money for our XMAS presents ;-P
The atmosphere of kindness and instinct to spread joy naturally commanding this time of the year has prompted us to organize yet another great PROMO for our beloved public, where everyone gets a present – you a copy of the most professional file manager created by human ingenuity, and us the better part of $9.95 after each purchase.
To us, this sounds like a perfect manifestation of the holiday spirit.
Happy holidays everyone
Okay, so we were _almost_ there last time. Indeed, all seemed fine except for those hellish devices that use DHCAST128 key-exchange, which still refused to start working with ForkLift, even after the 1.7.6 release.
Our first reaction was: Who needs those anyway?
But that was only our irrepressible sense of humor butting in, of course, and finally, we did sit down to reviewing the many diagnostic reports you sent in and started coding like we’re supposed to.
So, we are now the proud owners (more like the proud authors) of a DHCAST128 module which we were generous enough to share with you in this 1.7.7 build.
ForkLift 1.7.7 should now enable you, our esteemed users, to manage those network storages without any more problems.
So, without further ado, let’s see how it performs:
Download ForkLift 1.7.7
As usual, all feedback is welcome.
Good nights everyone
I guess many of you are just as eager as we are to put an end to the AFP adventure ride we’ve been lost in for so long.
To take the next step though, we’ll need a bit of help from you.
Please, if you experienced broken AFP functionality the 1.7.6 release, run this diagnostic build for us.
The build detects what kind of protocols are used on the problem devices.
Here’s the build then: AFPInfoForkLift
and here’s how it works:
1. Launch the diagnostic build (first quit the regular copy of ForkLift)
2. Launch ‘Console’ with Spotlight
3. In the ForkLift Sidebar, click on the shared device to which ForkLift 1.7.6 failed to connect.
4. Something like this will show up in Console:
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] ##### AFPINFO START: 10.0.10.168 #####
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] versions: 4
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported protocols: AFP3.3
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported protocols: AFP3.2
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported protocols: AFP3.1
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported protocols: AFPX03
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] uams: 5
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported uams: DHCAST128
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported uams: DHX2
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported uams: Recon1
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported uams: Client Krb v2
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] 10.0.10.168: supported uams: No User Authent
11/11/09 5:51:14 PM ForkLift[5510] ##### AFPINFO END: 10.0.10.168 #####
5. Copy the output in Console (select lines from ##### AFPINFO START: ##### to ##### AFPINFO END: #####)
6. In an email to bugreport@binarynights.com describe the type of the device (eg. Synology Diskstation), and paste in the diagnostic output.
Thanks for your help
crew
ForkLift is complete once again.
As you probably noticed, we’ve passed the past 3-4 months in a quagmire called ‘ForkLift is no longer able to connect to AFP shares on Snow Leopard’.
It is difficult to describe the feeling – us, the self-proclaimed masters of connecting to all known devices failing to manage the most native form of sharing on Mac. For months we looked to Apple to magically send us a solution, but this proved to be an unreasonable hope. So, leaving Infinite Loop about 2 weeks ago, we decided to take matters in our own hands: to create our own implementation for AFP from scratch.
At the end of the first week we’ve lost about 40 hours of sleep each, immersed way above our heads in some real low-level stuff (handling Diffie–Hellman key exchange and such), we finally cracked the problem, coded our own procedures, and today we are proud to present our latest release, the one restoring ForkLift to its full splendor on SL:
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Welcome back to our homebrew series about the future ForkLift 2.0. Admittedly, there has been a short hiatus in the series, I will be discussing this later on, but first things first:
ForkLift 2.0 will be 64-bit, and Snow Leopard only.
I know from experience that announcements of this sort often fail to provoke the merry cries we normally expect.
So, just say it out loud a couple of times and let the warmth of the promise of a bright future wash over you. Because I know some questions inevitably pop up: What’s gonna happen to PPC users? Screw that, what’s gonna happen to Leopard users?
Well, first, stay calm, there’s no immediate threat. This is an early warning, ForkLift 2.0 is still a good way away. In fact, we don’t expect a beta before first quarter of 2010.
Second, we’ve had this same dilemma when moving from Tiger to Leopard, and speaking from experience, that all came out well in the end. Most people simply switched to Leopard sooner or later (rather sooner), and the few people who still use ForkLift 1.2 to this day seem pretty happy with the software they have. Also, let’s face it, the last PPC models were sold in 2006, about the time BinaryNights started out.
We’re continuing our arduous work of weeding out the bugs that inevitably showed up with the transition to Snow Leopard.
This update fixes a bug that involved only a small number of users, but which simply broke the rename operation for them, making ForkLift a bit impractical in some cases 
Also, we’ve had some positive vibe from the direction of Apple’s DTS team in the past days, so we are at the moment rather optimists concerning the one major outstanding problem we have on Snow Leopard – the broken AFP connection feature.
So, hopefully, we will be back with another update in a short while.
ForkLift 1.7.5 can be downloaded from this URL:
http://download.binarynights.com/ForkLift1.7.5.zip
Have a great weekend everyone
Delivering on our earlier promise, we’re bringing you this new build that should correct bugs and some of the lost functionality that have been discovered by Snow Leopard users in the 1.7.3sl hotfix release.
I herby thank everyone for their willing assistance in tracking down these bugs – without your reports and help, our job would have been incredibly more difficult.
Fixed bugs:
- QuickLook: will now work on remote volumes (Snow Leopard)
- AFP: “Connect as” to AFP now works (Leopard only)
- Spotlight: a bug caused items to be deleted from Spotlight search result in some circumstances
- WebDAV SharePoint server incompatibility fixed
- a couple of minor fixes
As expected, this update is a free one, runs on Leopard and Snow Leopard, and is recommended for users of both systems.
You can download the build directly from here:
http://download.binarynights.com/ForkLift1.7.4.zip
Have a nice week everyone!