applications

I've just released two updates: Pukka 1.8.2 and Meerkat 1.2.2. Both feature official support for Mac OS X 10.4 through 10.6. In addition, both include new features and both include some minor bug fixes.

You can grab Pukka and Meerkat in their usual places, or you can update within the respective applications via the app menu > Check For Updates... item.

Below are summaries of the changes.

Pukka:

New Features

• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard support. Pukka now supports 10.4 through 10.6. Please see our blog post regarding future support of 10.4.
• Search menu is now horizontally resizable from a minimum of the default width to a maximum of half of the screen width.
• Added a new preference to sort search results by visit count.
• Posted-to account has been added to the search tooltips.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the account selection popup could sometimes change inadvertently.
• Fixed a window resize bug that affected progress spinner placement.
• Search bar now remains unloaded into memory until first used.
• Search bar now auto-places to the right if screen size demands it.
• Search bar now auto-places properly after monitor & resolution changes.
• Search result selection should reset on new search results.
• When a caching error occurs, dismissing the error dialog with the "Ignore For Now" button will ignore further errors until the preferences have been edited, including across app relaunches.

And Meerkat:

New Features

• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard support. Meerkat now supports 10.4 through 10.6. Please see our blog post regarding future support of 10.4.
• Any tunnels that are active at app quit are re-activated on next launch if launch happens within a minute or so.
• The command-line tool now accepts tunnel name substrings. For example, meerkat myServer up will activate every tunnel whose name contains myServer.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some data storage issues that could cause error messages when saving or deleting several tunnels in a single run of the app.
• SSH ControlMaster support is now disabled for all tunnels. In current versions of OpenSSH, ControlMaster does not work with tunnels.

Enjoy, and please don't hesitate to post any comments, problems, or suggestions to the forums!

With the imminent release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard next month, it comes time to examine the state of our apps as well as their operating system support. Pukka was originally released in early 2006, in the time of 10.4 Tiger (and updated to support 10.5 Leopard in late 2007). Meerkat was originally released in mid-2008, supporting both Leopard and Tiger out of the gate.

We've made the choice so far to sacrifice many (but not all) advantages offered by Leopard in the name of Tiger support. However, with Snow Leopard's upcoming release, we will be shifting to support only Leopard and Snow Leopard going forward.

Beginning with the next major releases of both Pukka and Meerkat (likely 1.9 and 1.3, respectively), we will no longer be including support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Current release versions will be supported for Tiger users, but little or no new functionality will be added going forward.

PowerPC architecture will still be supported, though of course Snow Leopard will run only on Intel-based Macintoshes.

Snow Leopard support is expected in the next point release of each application (e.g., Pukka 1.8.2 and Meerkat 1.2.2). We expect to have each of these released in the next month.

We would love to continue Tiger support indefinitely, but as the operating system was released in 2005, we would rather move ahead and take advantage of the new technologies that Apple is providing to developers in order to create the best possible experience for the broadest user base.

If you have any questions or comments about this announcement, please contribute to the forum post on the topic.

Update: Please see the Pukka and Meerkat forums for the latest betas of each, which work with Snow Leopard right now.

Update 2: Official, stable releases of both apps are now up. Please see the announcement.