Blog

Groups in Gamma Board

Gamma Board lets you adjust the gamma settings for screens remotely, which is nice in a studio because you can tweaks the colors from a distance while seeing the whole picture. But if you have a lot of screens to color-manage, it can still be tedious to adjust each of them individually for every change in surrounding lighting.

This is what groups aims to solve. You can still tweak each screen individually as before, but starting in version 1.2 screens also belong to a group. A group has gamma settings similar to screens, but group settings apply to all screens in the group. Group settings are merged with the individual settings for each screen, and the final result is sent to the computer that controls each screen.

A new set document (or a set imported from a previous version) will start with one “main group” that contains all the screens. You can create new groups as needed by tapping the “+” button in the toolbar below the list of screen and choosing “Add Group”. You can move screens between groups the same way you can reorder screens: using drag & drop.

Gamma Board 1.2 is available on the App Store. Customers with a branded version can request an update to the customized app.

Gamma Control: Launch at Login

The new version 6.1 of Gamma Control released today has one new feature: a checkbox to automatically launch at login. It was possible to launch Gamma Control at login earlier by adding it to the login items in System Preferences, but this is not very reliable on modern versions of macOS.

By making the feature part of the app, this should work better. In particular, with this checked, the app will not fall into a sort of zombie state where it looks open but it’s just the system lying to you in order to save ressources used by apps that have no window open.

Version 6.1 is a free update for users of version 6.0. Customers with a branded version can request an update to the customized app.

High Sierra

macOS 10.13 High Sierra is coming next week. I usually don’t have much to say about new macOS releases since everything continues to work normally. This year is a bit different however. Here’s how my apps are affected.

Counterparts Lite

The filter control at the top of the window showing you how many rows are in each state wasn’t displaying correctly with High Sierra. The calculation for the size of each cell was inconsistent at times causing some numbers to change into “…” when displayed. This has been fixed in version 1.5.1 released today.

Black Light & Gamma Control

Since the 10.12.4 update of macOS Sierra, the invert filter of Black Light stopped working on many hardware configurations. This was due to a bug in macOS which has been fixed in High Sierra. You don’t need to update Black Light: just upgrade to High Sierra to get the invert filter to work again.

The same thing was happening with Gamma Control when values for all channels of the black point were higher than those of the white point (effectively inverting the screen). Upgrading to High Sierra fixes this issue.

Sim Daltonism & Red Stripe

Moving the filter window by dragging it from the title bar was not working in High Sierra due to a change in how mouse events are propagated. Update to Sim Daltonism 2.0.2 and Red Stripe 2.0.2 published today to fix the issue.

Counterparts Lite 1.5

This is a small update to Counterparts Lite introducing a new feature and an improvement to how row states are calculated.

Find & Replace lets you quickly change a word or phrase everywhere in a document. It shows you a nice preview of the changes. You can choose whether to apply the change or not for each row. And there’s a useful checkbox to automatically capitalize the first letter of your replacement text when the text it replaces begins with a capital.

Empty strings now count as not translated. In previous versions, the presence of a string (empty or not) counted as a translated string. This however was confusing because if you edited an empty row without changing anything in it, it would then be marked as translated. You could still undo the change or delete the string from the Table menu.

More bug fixes and small improvements are detailed on the What’s new page.