LaunchBar 5.1.3 - July 17, 2011

• New When an address book contact is selected, Shift-Space can be used to quickly create a new email message.
• New When Terminal.app is selected, press Space to quickly enter a command to be run in a new Terminal window.
• New Show pre-release versions option in Preferences > Software Update to get notified about beta versions and nightly builds.
• Fixes an issue causing network mounts not to appear in the Mounted Volumes list on OS X Lion.
• Fixes an incompatibility with sandboxed applications on OS X Lion.
• Fixes an issue when pressing Space on .applescript files.
• Fixes an issue with Calculator on Mac OS X 10.4.
• Adds a private user default named SpaceKeyShowsRelatedURLs for customizing the behavior when pressing Space on URLs.

LaunchBar 5.1.2 - July 1, 2011

• Fixes an issue with iCal event creation.

LaunchBar 5.1.1 - July 1, 2011

• Fixes a crash at startup related to iTunes indexing.

LaunchBar 5.1 - July 1, 2011

New Features

• New Automatic software updates to check, download and install new versions. Turned off by default (unless you’ve already turned on update notifications in a previous version). Can be turned on in LaunchBar Preferences > Software Update.
• New The list font size can now be adjusted in Preferences > Appearance.
• The default font size of the search result list has been increased.
• New Allows to specify locations when creating iCal events. The location must be separated with another ‘@’ character. Example: “Meeting with Bob @ Joe’s Cafe @ next Mon 3pm”. You can press the Tab key to enter the ‘@’ more quickly.
• New Adds support for third party calendar event creation utilities. You can choose your preferred calendar input method in Preferences > Actions > Options. You can choose between LaunchBar, Fantastical (http://flexibits.com/fantastical) and QuickCal (http://quickcalapp.com/).
• New If an application provides a text service, this service can now be easily triggered by selecting that application and pressing Space. For example, to post a new tweet via Twitter, select the Twitter.app, press Space and enter your message.
• New Adds support for indexing Google Chrome bookmarks and history.
• New Adds support for indexing Chromium bookmarks and history.
• New Adds “Search App Store” functionality: Select the App Store application and press Space to enter your search.
• New After opening a search template you can press Shift-Space to insert the most recently used search string from other templates. This makes it easier to repeat a search with a different search engine.
• New Bookmarks and URLs can now be edited prior to opening them by pressing Space. Note that those URL changes are NOT written back to your bookmarks file.
• New When browsing contact detail categories (Phone Numbers, Email Addresses, Postal Addresses), the corresponding values are displayed next to the person’s name.
• New For advanced iTunes Library management there’s now an “Identically Named Albums” category. It’s actually a spin-off of our improved iTunes indexing. It’s created whenever your iTunes Library contains identically named albums from different artists.
• New Adds a new “Copy Screenshot of Selected Window Without Shadow” action to built-in actions.
• New Adds a new “Run Shell Command” action. The entered command is executed in background, without opening a Terminal window.
• New Adds a new “Clear Clipboard History” action. Alternatively, Option-Delete can be used to clear the history while the history list is opened.
• New The “Hide Dock Icon” option will now be preserved across updates, provided that the update gets installed via automatic software update.
• New When turning on the “Hide Dock Icon” option in Preferences > Advanced, the necessary application restart can now be performed automatically.

Improved File Content Browsing & File Content Search

• Browsing & Search now works for all file types that can be converted into plain text (.txt, .rtf, .rtfd, .html, .h, .m, .doc, .webarchive, etc.)
• The Search File Contents action can now be triggered more conveniently with Command-F. Alternatively, it can still be triggered with Option-Space or Control-Space.
• New Property List Browsing (Developers, you will love this!): Select a *.plist file and press Right Arrow to browse the plist hierarchy. Works also with a number of other filetypes such as .strings, .dict, .pbxproj or .ini and more.
• New When browsing text, a line of text can now be further browsed by pressing Right Arrow. The line will then be split into white space separated tokens.

Improvements

• Improves Mac OS X 10.7 Lion compatibility. Note: For best compatibility with Lion’s new full screen mode feature you should turn on LaunchBar Preferences > General > Nonactivating Mode and hide the Dock icon via LaunchBar Preferences > Advanced > Hide Dock Icon.
• Improves iTerm support, adding support for iTerm 2.
• Adds key repeat support when browsing the running apps list with Command-Space/Space.
• Browsing the running apps list upwards (with the Shift key held down) now performs a wrap around (same as when browsing the list downwards without the Shift key).
• Improves Instant Open: Press and hold an abbreviation character along with the Shift key can now be used to temporarily suppress the Hide Other Applications option (which you may have turned on in Preferences > Actions > Option).
• Improves Quick Look support.
• Improves handling of keyboard layouts, especially the various Dvorak variants.
• Improves abbreviation search algorithm.
• Corrected www.oanda.com currency conversion search templates in factory configuration.
• Automator workflows in /System/Library/Services are now indexed by the Services indexing rule.
• Improves the “Copy” and “Copy and Paste” actions. These actions now ask for a text to be entered when invoked directly with Return.
• Improves the handling of custom AppleScript actions (which can be placed in ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions).
• Improves the “Set Color Label” actions.
• Improves automatic index updates when running LaunchBar in nonactivating mode.
• Improves automatic application index update when installing or updating applications from the Mac App Store.
• Improves ADC documentation indexing.
• Improves display of Finder color labels.

Bug Fixes

• Fixes a hanging issue when using Modifier Taps on Mac OS X 10.4.
• Fixes an issue when creating iCal events in a calendar whose name isn’t unique across multiple accounts.
• Fixes an issue when indexing DevonTHINK database files.
• Fixes an issue when quitting applications from within LaunchBar’s app switcher in nonactivating mode.
• Fixes an issue with Opera bookmarks indexing.
• Fixes an issue with the User Accounts indexing rule causing user names with non-ASCII characters to be displayed incorrectly.
• Fixes an issue with playback of equally named albums in iTunes.
• Fixes an issue that could cause the LaunchBar window to refuse keyboard input when running in nonactivating mode with Automatic Hiding turned off.
• Fixes a display issue with items containing line break characters in their name.
• Addresses an issue with the Calendar > Show in iCal action.
• Fixes an issue causing Paste and Remove from History to fail in conjunction with BBEdit or TextWrangler.
• Fixes an issue when showing a large list of items on a small screen.
• Fixes an issue with ClipMerge causing a wrong line separator to be used when merging rich text.

Removed Features

• Removes support for Sherlock Channels.
• Removes support for Watson Tools.

LaunchBar 5.0.4 - February 3, 2011

• Adds compatibility with Cyberduck 3.8.
• The User Accounts indexing rule no longer indexes network user accounts.
• Fixes an issue that made it impossible to set the Mailing Label Personal Prefix user preference to an empty string.
• Fixes an issue with Address Book labels.
• Fixes an issue when creating iCal all-day events on Mac OS X 10.5.
• Fixes an issue with iCal date & time input.
• Fixes an issue with the Start Screen Saver action.
• Fixes an issue with the Dvorak keyboard layout.

LaunchBar 5.0.3 - October 18, 2010

• Added support for Firefox bookmark folders.
• Phone numbers are now formatted according to the “Automatically format phone numbers” option specified in Address Book preferences.
• Added support for phonetic first name / last name of Address Book contacts.
• Calculator: The letter “a” can now be used as a placeholder for the most recent calculator result. For example, if you have just calculated “2 + 3” you can then enter “a * (a + 8)” to calculate “5 * (5 + 8)”.
• Added “round” to built-in Calculator functions. Example: round(1.225|2) results in 1.23
• Improved iTunes indexing and playback if the iTunes library contains equally named albums from different artists. Note that the “album artist” must be set accordingly in iTunes, so that LaunchBar can distinguish between the different albums.
• Added “Bing”, “Bing Images” and “Linguee” to factory search templates.
• Added support for browsing Aperture’s recent libraries. Select the Aperture application in LaunchBar and press Right Arrow to get the list of recent libraries.
• New AppleScript property “has keyboard focus”. Tells if the LaunchBar window currently has keyboard focus.
• Added “Secure Empty Trash” action.
• Clipboard History: Improved heuristics for detection and naming of image items.
• Browsing backwards (with the left arrow key) has been improved for invisible files.
• Improved indexing of Developer Documentation.
• The currently used iTunes library is now detected more reliably.
• Sorting by modification date (which can be accomplished by browsing a collection with Command-Right Arrow) now also works with categories (e.g. PDF Documents, Numbers Documents, etc.)
• Improved indexing of Address Book labels.
• Improved “Empty Trash” action.
• Improved “Eject” action.
• Improved “Start Screen Saver” action.
• Improved “New TextEdit Document” action.
• Improved Cyberduck bookmark icons.
• Improved iCal calendar indexing.
• iCal input: Improved date parsing on non-English systems.
• Improved recent documents access on Mac OS X 10.5.
• Improved German localization.
• Fixed an issue causing keypresses not to reach the active application immediately after closing LaunchBar.
• Fixed Internet Movie Database (IMDb) search template in factory configuration.
• Fixed an issue causing the “Open Terminal here” action (Command-T) to fail if iTerm was selected as the preferred terminal application.
• Fixed an issue when browsing the contents of an indexing rule with the space bar.
• Fixed an issue when browsing the list of running apps backwards with the Shift key held down (e.g. Command-Shift-Space).
• Fixed an issue with recent documents of Snow Leopard’s new QuickTime Player.
• Fixed: On Mac OS X 10.6 some CoreServices apps were missing from the Applications index (Ticket Viewer.app, Certificate Assistant.app, Directory Utility.app, etc.)
• Fixed an issue when creating all-day calendar events.
• Fixed an issue with the “Show in Current Finder window” action.
• Fixed an issue with LaunchBar’s Help index file.
• Fixed a minor memory leak when copying images from rich text documents.
• Implemented workaround for a Mac OS X bug that caused detection of modifier taps to fail under some circumstances.
• Some internal code cleanup.

LaunchBar 5.0.2 - November 4, 2009

• Note: Due to a necessary change in the internal representation of service items, existing abbreviation bindings for these items are not preserved. It may be necessary to re-train (or re-assign) the affected abbreviations.
• Fixed: Services didn’t work on non-English systems.
• Improved Services indexing, avoiding duplicates if an application is installed twice or more.
• Fixed a memory leak during Services indexing.
• Fixed an issue causing the “open location” AppleScript command to fail if invoked in the context of LaunchBar.
• Fixed an issue with “Hide Dock Icon”.
• Fixed: Due to a bug in Mac OS X some categories were labeled with an incorrect name (e.g. Preview Documents instead of PDF Documents).
• Fixed: Sending text to applications by pressing Tab didn’t work with some applications and it didn’t work at all on non-English systems.
• Added Wolfram Alpha search template to factory configuration.

LaunchBar 5.0.1 - October 20, 2009

• Fixed a rare crashing issue related to Services indexing.

LaunchBar 5 Final Version - October 20, 2009

Changes specific to this release

• Much improved Services indexing and invocation (the former implementation didn’t work reliably on Snow Leopard).
• Added “Finder > Recent Folders” functionality (select Finder and press Right Arrow or space bar).
• Added “Add to Things” action.
• Added Google Blog Search to factory search templates.
• Improved indexing of ADC developer documentation.
• Improved detection of current Firefox profile.
• Improved Show in Index / Assign Abbreviation functionality.
• Improved input of keyboard shortcuts in preferences window.
• The “Party Shuffle” actions have been renamed to “iTunes DJ”.
• The “Play Instant Send sound effect” preference option is now turned off by default to prevent delays when invoking Instant Send.
• The Send to LaunchBar service is now only installed if Instant Send is actually used.
• Fixed: Move & Replace didn’t work on Snow Leopard when attempting to replace a file package.
• Fixed: Copy / Move didn’t work on Snow Leopard when the filename contained a slash character.
• Fixed: iCal input failed to create all-day event when the year was separated by comma.
• Fixed: Firefox bookmarks index contains hidden items.
• Fixed an issue with display of keyboard shortcuts for some non-English keyboard layouts.
• Fixed: Search in iTunes didn’t work.
• Fixed: The Services menu appeared twice in contextual menus.
• Fixed: Quick Look of symlink now shows a preview of the original file.
• Fixed an issue with Xcode > Recent Projects access.
• Fixed a rare threading issue when prefetching application icons.

LaunchBar 5 Release Candidate 4 - August 28, 2009

• This version is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

LaunchBar 5 Release Candidate 3 - June 16, 2009

• Improved Send-to support allowing to send text to a wider range of applications.
• Improved TinyURL actions, adding “http://” prefix if missing.
• Fixed an issue with calendar input.

LaunchBar 5 Release Candidate 2 - May 30, 2009

• Clipboard History ignore list to protect sensitive data copied from applications such as Keychain Access. The list can be configured in Preferences > Clipboard.
• Enhanced “display in large type” AppleScript command: Added optional arguments “after delay” and “with sound”.
• Improved ClipMerge compatibility with third party applications.
• Improved Search in Spotlight: Search strings in double quotes are now left unchanged to allow phrase searches.
• Improved handling of URLs with fragment identifier.
• Improved “Make TinyURL” action.
• Added “Copy as TinyURL” action.
• The “perform action” AppleScript command now expects the action name parameter to be non-localized.
• Fixed: Calculator input didn’t accept plus sign in exponent.
• Fixed: Changing LaunchBar’s selection from within custom actions failed under some circumstances.
• Revised documentation.

LaunchBar 5 Release Candidate 1 - April 30, 2009

• When creating iCal events, it’s now possible to specify an alarm. If no alarm is specified, the default alarm setting of iCal preferences is applied.
• The Clipboard History can now also been used while entering text within LaunchBar, e.g. in Search Templates, Calculator, Open Location, when renaming files, etc.
• 30-day trial period.
• Additional built-in actions: Hide, Hide Others (Usage: Select app, press Tab, select action), Make TinyURL, Show Type and Creator, Copy Screenshot of Selected Area, Copy Screenshot of Selected Window.
• Improved “file exists at destination” dialog: The Stop button can now be triggered with the Escape key and the Don’t Replace button (which only appears when moving more than one item) with Command-D.
• Addressing an issue on Mac OS X 10.4 when opening LaunchBar automatically at login.
• Fixed: Some actions didn’t display localized title during text input.
• Several other, minor bug fixes.

LaunchBar 5 Beta 7 - March 31, 2009

• Registration: It’s now possible to register the software. License keys are available at http://www.obdev.at/launchbar/order.html. The built-in evaluation license expires on May 1, 2009.
• Send-to (pressing Tab) now allows to select text files to perform “Append Text”.
• When pasting URLs to the “Open Location” field, surrounding quotes and angle brackets are now removed automatically.
• Updated search templates in factory configuration for MacUpdate and VersionTracker.
• Fixed an issue when attempting to move a folder with insufficient access permissions.
• Fixed an issue with “Force Quit” in app switcher.
• Fixed: Moving/Copying files with a slash in their name didn’t work.
• Fixed: The Replace option didn’t work for “Make Alias” and “Make Symlink” actions.
• Fixed: Instant Send didn’t work in Safari 4 on German systems.
• Fixed: Browsing similar URLs (by pressing the Right Arrow key) did no longer work.

LaunchBar 5 Beta 6 - February 27, 2009

• Extended set of Clipboard History default actions. It’s now possible to choose between “Copy”, “Paste” and “Copy and Paste”, and to specify “As Plain Text” separately for each of these actions. Note that the corresponding preference setting from previous betas is not automatically translated to this new scheme, so you have to select your preferred default action in Preferences > Clipboard.
• Improved text input.
• The “Enter Text” action now allows to send the entered text directly by pressing Tab (it’s no longer necessary to press Return first).
• When a text item is selected, pressing Space now allows to edit the text.
• Improved “Open Location” action to ensure a URLs RFC 2396 compliance (non-ASCII characters are automatically encoded using UTF-8).
• iCal input now accepts three digit time specifiers (e.g. 530pm)
• iCal input now accepts A and P to specify a.m. and p.m.
• New optional Calculator setting: Switch to Calculator when typing “=”
• Calculator now accepts typographic math symbols such as × and ÷
• Improved stability in case of corrupted text-to-speech installation (LaunchBar sometimes crashed due to corrupted voice file in the /System/Library/Speech/Voices folder).
• Fixed an issue in app switcher. Pressing F (without any modifier keys) triggered the “Force Quit” action.
• Fixed a performance issue with the “Add to Party Shuffle” action.
• Revised documentation.

LaunchBar 5 Beta 5 - January 28, 2009

• The clipboard history selection is now preserved. Reopening the clipboard history now selects the previously selected history item.
• Fixed a bug causing the Mac OS X WindowServer process to slow down after turning off Clipboard History or ClipMerge.

LaunchBar 5 Beta 4 - January 26, 2009

• Firefox bookmarks and history indexing now also works while Firefox is running.
• Clipboard History > Select from history: Pressing Command-C during auto activation now copies the selected item and hides LaunchBar.
• Improved menu shortcuts in the “choose file operation” menu (digits instead of function keys).
• When an address book contact is selected, pressing Space no longer triggers Quick Look but lets you browse the contact details. Quick Look can still be invoked for these items with Command-Y.
• Added “Run Terminal Command” action.
• Added “Check for Updates” command to gear wheel menu.
• The “Save Text” action now also works in nonactivating mode.
• Text is now passed to Shell Script actions as a single argument.
• Fixed an issue with Japanese text input (pressing the space bar had no effect).
• Fixed: Search templates based on file-URLs didn’t work.
• Fixed: The “Copy” clipboard history action didn’t work in beta 3.
• Fixed an issue with Clipboard History. The image transparency of screenshots was not preserved.
• Fixed an issue when dragging items onto a selected folder in LaunchBar.
• Fixed an incompatibility with Typinator.
• Fixed an incompatibility between ClipMerge and Mac OS X 10.4 causing LaunchBar to refuse any keyboard input under some circumstances.

LaunchBar 5 Beta 3 - December 31, 2008

• New Clipboard History default action: Paste as Plain Text.
• The Clipboard History action “Copy and Paste” has been changed to “Paste”, so the current clipboard contents are no longer altered when pasting a clipboard history item.
• Added “Send to” support for Clipboard History items (by pressing the Tab key).
• Reduced memory footprint of Clipboard History.
• The Clipboard preferences help button now opens the correct help page.
• Creating iCal events: Several bug fixes and improvements when entering time and date:
  • The hour/minute separator (colon or dot) can now be omitted in non-ambiguous cases (e.g. Fri 0800-1030). However, it’s still necessary to enter the separator in ambiguous cases (Jan 13, 2010 vs. Jan 13, 20:10)
  • Fixed an issue when entering time ranges across noon or midnight (e.g. 10-12.30pm)
  • Fixed an issue when entering only weekday and time (e.g. Fri 7.30pm)
• Added “Recompress Image” actions.
• Fixed an issue when dragging multiple files onto LaunchBar’s Dock icon.
• Added missing German localization in software update check.
• Fixed an issue causing LaunchBar not to hide when started automatically at login.
• Fixed an issue with Instant Send / Get Finder Selection (Command-G) when there was nothing selected in Finder.
• The shortcut for “Run in Background” / “Execute in Background” has been changed from Shift-Return to Option-Return to resolve a conflict with the new “Apply last entered text to selected item” feature, which also uses the Shift-Return shortcut.
• The “Check Spelling While Typing” setting of LaunchBar’s input window is now preserved across restarts.
• Fixed some issues with Asian input methods in LaunchBar’s text input field.
• The ClipMerge sound effect can now be customized by providing one or more sound files in the ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Sounds/ClipMerge folder. If this folder contains more than one sound file, the sound effect will be chosen randomly.
• Improved ClipMerge when typing Command-C-C via key repeat (when Command-C is kept pressed until ClipMerge is performed).
• The Command-Space-Space app switcher can now be cancelled with Escape while the Command key is still pressed.
• Files can now be sent to Services menu actions via “Send to”.
• Fixed an issue causing launched applications not to become active (occurred only when running LaunchBar without a Dock icon).
• Fixed a crashing issue when invoking Entourage actions on computers not having Entourage installed.
• Fixed a rare crashing issue at startup.

LaunchBar 5 Beta 2 - December 15, 2008

• Fixed a number of issues with ClipMerge. Most notably, all incompatibilities with third party applications should now be resolved.
• ClipMerge now requires “Enable access for assistive devices” to be turned on in Universal Access Preferences.
• Fixed an issue causing Clipboard History to contain duplicate entries under some circumstances.
• The Quick Look preview panel can now be scrolled with the scroll wheel.
• Fixed an issue with Calculator causing an “Error” result at certain calculations.
• Fixed an issue with Calculator when entering numbers in exponential notation (e.g. 1e-6).
• Pressing Space now correctly performs a deep sub-search in case of indexing rules.
• Fixed an issue when moving files across volume boundaries causing the moved item not to be removed from its previous location.
• Improved error handling when moving files.
• Fixed an issue when turning LaunchBar’s Dock icon on or off in Preferences > Advanced.
• Corrected keyboard shortcut of “Show Index” command shown in LaunchBar’s gear wheel menu.
• Showing the correct 10.5 style folder icon in case of application folders.

LaunchBar 5 Beta 1 - December 5, 2008

• First beta release of LaunchBar 5. See the LaunchBar 5 Beta page for details about new features and improvements.

Firefox 3 bookmarks and history

If your current LaunchBar configuration already contains indexing rules for Firefox 2 bookmarks and/or history, you first have to delete these existing rules and then re-add them to the configuration to make them work with Firefox 3.

New location of configuration and preferences files

LaunchBar 5 uses new locations for storing its configuration and preferences information. When you run LaunchBar 5 for the very first time, your existing LaunchBar 4 configuration data is copied to the new location.

LaunchBar 4

LaunchBar 5

As a consequence, when switching between LaunchBar 4 and 5, configuration changes made in LaunchBar 5 are not reflected in LaunchBar 4 and vice versa.