We have been advised that there will be some maintenance activity at our hosting provider, starting today (7th May) and ending some time on Thursday (9th May). If everything works as it is supposed to, there should be no visible disruption to our website, but there’s always a chance that something might happen during the maintenance period that causes problems.

We’re planning some maintenance on our website on Friday of this week; things should be back to normal again by first thing Saturday, but it is possible that there could be some disruption this weekend also.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.4 of VMOptimizer.

Changes since version 1.0.3:

• Fixed issue with list of machines not updating from VMware Fusion 5.
• Fixed a crasher that could occur if VMOptimizer detected inconsistencies with the file system.

You can get the latest version by selecting “Check for updates…” from the VMOptimizer menu, or you can download this update directly from our website.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 2.2.4 of iDefrag.

Changes since version 2.2.3:

• Improved error message when Quick (on-line) algorithm encounters Time Machine backups.
• Some accessibility improvements.
• Fixed running on 10.5 and some 10.6 configurations.
• Fixed a crasher that you could get if you tried to create a recovery disk on certain disks.
• Fixed a hang that could occur in some rare error scenarios.
• Fixed a farily rare hang that you could get whilst running in the exclusive restart mode.

You can get the latest version by selecting “Check for updates…” from the iDefrag menu, or you can download this update directly from our website.

Unfortunately we’ve discovered that the recently released version 2.2.2 will only run on 10.7 and later due to a problem with code signing and a bug in the script we use to work around it.

We’ve fixed this issue at our end, and as a result we’re releasing version 2.2.3 of iDefrag. There are no changes for users on 10.7 or 10.8; this fix only affects users on earlier systems.

The auto-update feature is broken in versions 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 so if that applies to you, please get the update directly from our website.

Changes since version 2.2.2:

• Fixed code signature requirements to work with 10.6 and earlier.

You can get the latest version by selecting “Check for updates…” from the iDefrag menu, or you can download this update directly from our website.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 2.2.2 of iDefrag.

The auto-update feature is broken in versions 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 so if that applies to you, please get the update directly from our website.

Changes since version 2.2.1:

• Updated artwork for Retina displays.
• Significant speed boost to the initial reading of the disk.
• Fixed the exclusive restart feature so that it works on wrapped HFS+ volumes again.
• Fixed a crash that could occur if you click the Info button in the early stages of using the Quick algorithm.
• Fixed a crash that you could get if iDefrag encountered an error whilst using the on-line algorithm.

You can get the latest version by selecting “Check for updates…” from the iDefrag menu, or you can download this update directly from our website.

We have been testing iDefrag and iPartition on the released version of Mountain Lion for the last couple of weeks and have not found any problems, so we’re happy to say that our products are compatible with Mountain Lion. That said, there’s always a chance that we’ve missed something so please get in touch if you do spot anything that’s not quite right.

There is an issue with VMOptimizer at the moment which we have fixed, but we just need to release it; expect to see that update very soon.

We are working on some updates to add some high resolution artwork to support the new MacBook Pro retina displays, along with some other minor improvements. Those updates should be available fairly soon.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 2.2.1 of iDefrag.

The auto-update feature is broken in versions 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 so if that applies to you, please get the update directly from our website.

Unfortunately there were a couple of problems with the new recovery partition feature in version 2.2.0. The code for the new feature came directly from iPartition but some mistakes were made integrating it and so it only worked for the limited test cases that we tried. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused customers.

We have also got to the bottom of the issue we mentioned regarding FileVault and 10.7.4. It turns out it didn’t have anything to do with FileVault and was in fact a problem with machines running 32 bit kernels and Lion. Lion defaults to running the Kernel in 64 bit mode on most machines which is why we missed it here.

Changes since version 2.2.0:

• Fixed issues with recovery partition feature.
• Fixed problem running on 32 bit machines and 10.7.4.
• Fixed issues with using the online algorithm or disk verification whilst running from the recovery partition.

You can get the latest version by selecting “Check for updates…” from the iDefrag menu, or you can download this update directly from our website.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 2.2.0 of iDefrag. NOTE: The auto-update feature is broken in versions 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 so if this applies to you, please get the update directly from our website. For earlier versions, the auto-update feature should work fine and you can simply select “Check for Updates…” from the iDefrag menu.

In this version we have added support for creating a recovery partition and running iDefrag from it (just as we did with iPartition). You can read more about that particular feature here. To use this feature, simply select “Create Boot Disk…” from the iDefrag menu and follow the instructions.

We also fixed a number of bugs and we sincerely apologise if any of them affected you. You can read full release notes here.

We are aware of some customers who have had problems using iDefrag’s exclusive restart feature with FileVault on 10.7.4. We’ve been unable to reproduce it reliably here. If you do encounter problems with this version and you have trouble booting your machine after trying, simply hold down the “Shift” key soon after you power on your machine and then your machine should boot normally. As with any problem you encounter, we ask that you let us know about it so we can improve our software. As an aside, we’re not convinced that you will see a big benefit from defragmenting volumes that are encrypted using FileVault because it has it’s own fragmentation which iDefrag doesn’t tackle and any performance benefit that you might see from using iDefrag is likely to be insignificant compared that incurred from using encryption.

Please contact or support team with any feedback or support requests.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.4.0.

The major new feature in this version is the ability to create a recovery disk with iPartition on an external drive (including USB flash drive). This feature is Lion only.

There are also a number of other bug fixes.

This update can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or via the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition 3 itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems or feedback, please contact our support team.

When we first set up our website, we didn’t allow user-specified passwords; we just generated one, and that was your password (rather like a registration key, in a way). This was obviously not ideal, so pretty soon we started allowing customers to specify their own passwords but we wanted to make sure that the passwords were reasonably strong as we do occasionally see attacks on our systems.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, we started out using cracklib, an Open Source password checking library. Over time, two things became apparent:

• The checks that cracklib does are in some cases too onerous.

• When the check does fail, cracklib does not give error messages that are understandable or useful to end users.

Now, we prefer to spend our time working on our products rather than our website, and this was a relatively minor issue (some of you didn’t think so, I accept, but you were in the minority) and had an easy workaround of using a somewhat more secure than necessary password and storing it in Keychain (or in your chosen browser’s password database). As a result, while we were aware of the problem, it took us a while to get around to doing anything about it.

Attempt number two was based on another piece of Open Source code, pwtools, which is a port of the algorithm from the OpenWall Project‘s passwdqc to Python. This was a distinct improvement, and we’re actually still using it to generate and suggest passwords, but it still ended up with some customers puzzled as to why it was rejecting their passwords when they felt they were perfectly good enough. We didn’t always disagree.

Anyway, I’m pleased to let everyone know that we are now on attempt number three. This time, we’ve written the code ourselves rather than borrowing from others; fewer passwords should be banned, and because we have a Javascript implementation of the checking code it’s now possible to see in real time in the Change Password form how strong we think your chosen password is.

I’m sure there will still be people who want to use a password that our form doesn’t like. Hopefully, though, this should now mean that the password they’ve chosen is genuinely bad as opposed to not meeting some unusual rule that someone else has come up with. If you were one of the people who wanted to set their own password but found it too tricky, please do try again and let us know how you get on.

p.s. Please don’t use the same password on multiple websites. While we’ve implemented our site in such a way that we can’t tell what your password is, not everyone does, and some database administrators and website operators will, as a result, have access to the text of your password. It’s much better to use Keychain Access or 1Password so that you can have separate passwords for each purpose.

We’ve received a number of queries (and a few bug reports) relating to the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion developer preview, some in under 24 hours from the developer seeds becoming available. To be clear:

• We do not&nbsp_place_holder;recommend running disk utility software (anybody’s, not just ours) on pre-release versions of Mac OS X. For all we know, Apple has made changes to the filesystem that require updates to our code.

• We do not&nbsp_place_holder;provide support for use of our software on developer preview versions of OS X.

• Developer pre-releases of OS X have been known to contain serious bugs, some of which could result in data loss. While we are aware that some end-users like to run the developer previews, they are really intended for developers to test their products in advance of the release of the new version, and Apple does not even recommend that developers&nbsp_place_holder;run the seed releases on their main development systems.

Finally, please remember that, no matter how many people have access to it, developer preview software is covered by a non-disclosure agreement. We will accept bug reports (though it may be a technical breach of the NDA on your part), but under the terms of the Developer Agreement the only place we can talk to you about the developer preview release is the Apple Developer Forums website, and that isn’t an appropriate place for us to provide support.

UPDATE: Beta 3 is now available.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of a beta for the next update to iPartition. This beta version is available to all existing owners of iPartition. It can be downloaded here. If you’re not already logged in, you’ll be asked the username and password that you use for our site.

So what’s new?

As owners of iPartition will know, you cannot manipulate the disk that you have booted from which has meant that, to repartition your main start-up drive, you need to either boot from an external drive, or create a bootable DVD. To help with creating a bootable DVD, we have a feature in iPartition that allows you to create a bootable DVD, either from a template that you download from our site, or from the DVD installation media that came with your machine. Unfortunately, newer machines no longer come with DVD installation media and the latest downloadable template that we have (which is supplied by Apple), will not boot newer machines. We have asked Apple for updated templates but we don’t have them yet.

With Lion, Apple introduced Lion Recovery. This works by having a separate partition on your hard drive that includes a base system allowing you to reinstall Lion over the Internet. Internet Recovery is a related feature but is supported within the firmware of the machine (and therefore is only present on the latest machines).

In this version of iPartition, we’ve added support for creating a duplicate of your Lion recovery partition containing our applications. Obviously, to use this new feature you will need to be running Lion and you will need to have a recovery partition present (which should usually be the case, but we have heard of cases where the recovery partition is missing).

You will also need an external drive or USB flash drive to install the partition on (since the restriction of not being able to manipulate the disk you booted from still applies). The partition takes up a little over 650 MB (at time of writing), so you don’t need a very big drive. Cheap USB flash drives are readily available.

The duplicate recovery partition should operate in exactly the same way as your existing Lion Recovery partition (i.e. you can reinstall Lion and run other utilities) but you will also have the option of running iPartition. We’ll soon be adding support for iDefrag too.

If the external drive already has data on it, the data should be preserved (iPartition will shrink existing partitions to make room) so long as it uses the correct partition scheme (GUID). It will warn you if that’s not the case and you can, of course, use iPartition to change the partition scheme non-destructively.

After creating the recovery partition, you can boot from it by holding down the Option (⌥) key when you power on your machine.

We are particularly interested in hearing from customers who received their machines with Lion pre-installed. If that applies to you, please give this Beta version a try and let us know how you get on.

This version of iPartition also has a number of bug fixes and other minor improvements. Those of you who have reported issues with the current shipping version should find them all fixed with this release.

As always, please send feedback/queries to our support team.

Yesterday I released version 2.1.1 of iDefrag. Unfortunately, I’ve just discovered that there is a problem with the auto-update feature in version 2.1.0 which means you cannot update automatically. It is intermittent and it can sometimes succeed on faster machines which is why we did not notice it initially.

The bug was introduced in version 2.1.0 when support for quick termination was added. Quick termination means that when you quit an application it will quit much more quickly (but only when the application isn’t doing something). Regrettably, it broke our auto-update feature.

If you want to update to version 2.1.1, you can download the update directly from our website. If version 2.1.0 is working well for you, there is no need to upgrade to version 2.1.1 since the changes are relatively minor (see release notes).

Sadly, when we release version 2.1.2, the same problem will exist and upgrading to that version will also have to be done manually (if you’re running version 2.1.0 and 2.1.1).

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused our customers.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.2.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition 3 itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems, please contact our support team.

Without Steve Jobs, we might not have had the home computer. The graphical user interface and the now ubiquitous mouse might have remained in a lab at Xerox PARC. Pixar might have come to nothing, and we might still be waiting for high quality 3D special effects and animated films. NeXT computer might never have existed, and with it Objective-C (and possibly Java too), never mind the Cocoa frameworks and modern Mac OS X. We might not have had Truetype fonts, or Unicode, the tablet computer (the first, of course, being the Newton, though the iPad is the one everyone will remember) or the iPod. It might not have been possible to buy music, movies or TV shows easily online. And let’s not forget the impact the iPhone has had and continues to have on the mobile telephony market. The influence that Steve has had on our daily lives, both directly and indirectly, is hard to overstate.

Today is a sad day, for we have lost a great man.

Here’s to Steve.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iDefrag version 2.1.0.

This update contains full support for Lion and some other minor bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems, please contact our support team.

We’ve been made aware of a security issue caused by the Netherlands-based CA DigiNotar, who mistakenly issued a valid SSL wildcard certificate for google.com. The existence of this certificate, coupled with the implied lack of proper verification at DigiNotar, means that we consider it inappropriate that our systems continue to trust DigiNotar to issue SSL certificates.

As a result, effective immediately, we have instructed our machines (including our servers) not to trust the DigitNotar root certificate. This should not have an impact on customers unless you are (or your mail server admin is) using DomainKeys (aka DKIM) to certify outbound e-mail and the certificate you are using was issued by DigiNotar; in that specific case, there is a slightly increased risk that your e-mail will land in our junk filter. The fix, should you be in this situation, is to use a certificate issued by someone other than DigiNotar.

Microsoft has already removed the DigiNotar root certificate from its list of trusted certificates, and Mozilla has indicated that the same will happen with Firefox. Users of Safari (and indeed Mac OS X in general) may wish to take the following steps to disable trust of the DigiNotar root CA:

1. Start Keychain Access (you can do this from the Spotlight menu by entering “Keychain Access” in the search field, or by going to “/Applications/Utilities” in Finder).

2. Enter “digino” in the search field at the top right.

   

3. Double-click the “DigiNotar Root CA” certificate.

4. Open up the “Trust” settings.

5. Change the “When using this certificate:” setting to “Never Trust”.

   

6. Close the certificate window. You’ll be prompted for an admin username and password.

7. Ensure that the DigiNotar Root CA now looks like this in Keychain Access:

   

In particular, check that it says “This certificate is marked as not trusted for all users”.

Update (14:35 BST)

Owing to an apparent deficiency in the way Safari behaves with respect to root certificate trust (about which I’ve already filed a bug report), it may be better to simply delete the DigiNotar Root CA certificate altogether, since this will result in a more obvious response from Safari when visiting a site that depends on it.

To do that instead, select the DigiNotar Root CA certificate in Keychain Access, and choose “Delete” from the “Edit” menu.

Over the past day or so, we’ve spotted a couple of worrying messages on Apple’s support forums and mailing lists about a possible filesystem bug in Lion (10.7), in particular:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/Macos-x-server/2011/Aug/msg00195.html

and

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15933171#15933171

While we haven’t yet been able to reproduce or verify these reports, if they are real, it is possible&nbsp_place_holder;that they might be triggered by the “Quick (on-line)” defragmentation option in our iDefrag product. They will not occur with the off-line algorithms as those use our own code rather than Apple’s for accessing the disk.

Note that, if&nbsp_place_holder;these reports are to be believed, the bug is in Apple’s implementation of HFS+ itself, and not in any of our products. We’re drawing attention to the problem primarily to warn our customers of a possible problem, and not because we or any of our customers have seen or reported the problem ourselves.

We’re very pleased to announce the release of VMOptimizer, a new product that optimizes VMware virtual disk images.

For more information, please see our product page and give the demonstration version a try.

Many people are asking whether or not our products work with Lion. As of today, the current versions of both iDefrag (2.0.5) and iPartition (3.3.1) are compatible with Lion, with the following caveats:

• iDefrag’s “Reboot and defragment” mode does not function with Lion (yet… we are working on this). As a result, to run an off-line defragmentation algorithm you will need to boot from a different partition or disk, or from a bootable DVD, which you can create by choosing the “Create Boot Disk…” option from the “iDefrag” menu.

• iPartition will display the partition type for Core Storage partitions as 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC, which is the GUID (Globally Unique IDentifier) that Apple is using for Core Storage. This is expected behaviour, but we will be adding a name for this partition type in the next update.

• iPartition is not able to format or non-destructively resize Core Storage (i.e. Lion FileVault) partitions. As far as we are presently aware, there is no documentation for either the Core Storage volume format, or for the associated library that ships with Mac OS X, and it is therefore unlikely that we will be able to support Core Storage in iPartition any time soon.

We intend to release updates for both iDefrag and iPartition in due course to address some of these issues.

UPDATE: We have now released version 2.1.0 of iDefrag and version 3.3.2 of iPartition which have full Lion support.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.1.

This update contains a few bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed.

Please contact our support ream if you have any problems with this new version.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.0.

This update contains some new features (basic cloning support) and a few bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed.

We have also released an updated version of iDefrag Lite which now contains some of the features available in iDefrag 2 along with a few bug fixes.

Please contact our support ream if you have any problems with this new version.

We’ve got a new version of iPartition coming out soon and here’s a Beta version for you to try. Download it here (9 MB). (You might be prompted for the username and password that you use on our site.)

We’ve added basic cloning support: simply drag a partition to a disk, or to the free space on your current disk and it should queue an operation (or you can use the menu). The actual cloning operation should be pretty much as fast as the disks allow. Note that whilst it will clone Windows partitions happily, you’ll have to do a bit of work if you want to boot from them.

Anybody that reports a bug in the beta version, that we don’t know about, will get a free license for iDefrag¹.

Please send comments about this beta to our support team.

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iDefrag version 2.0.5. (Note that 2.0.4 was also available for a time, but contained a bug that affected users of the French localisation; this is fixed in 2.0.5.)

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iDefrag version 2.0.3.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

We’re pleased to announce the release of iDefrag version 2.0.2.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

We’re planning to release iDefrag 2.0.2 very soon. If you’d like to try the latest beta, you can get it here (15 MB) (you might be prompted for the username and password that you use on our site). There are no outstanding issues so we expect the beta to be pretty much what we’ll release.

We’ve fixed a number of things including a few issues with the restart feature. We’ll do full release notes for the release.

Anybody that reports a bug in the beta version, that we don’t know about, will get a free license for iPartition¹.

Please send comments about this beta to our support team.

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

We’re pleased to announce the release of the first update for iDefrag 2, version 2.0.1.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed.

(If you have upgraded to iDefrag 2 from a previous version and were following the iDefrag Atom feed, note that the URL for the iDefrag 2 feed is different; you may wish to point your feed reader at the iDefrag 2 feed instead.)

It’s been a while coming, but we’re pleased to announce that we have today released iDefrag 2.

If you’ve recently purchased iDefrag 1.x from us, you may already have a complementary license for iDefrag 2 (check the My Account page); otherwise, existing customers can upgrade at a reduced rate.

The major new features are:

• You can now run the offline algorithms without needing to create a boot disk; iDefrag can now reboot into a special mode where it has exclusive access to the disk.

• We’ve added the ability to defragment a single file.

• The online algorithm will now reliably skip files that are in use (regardless of whether or not they are using file locking).

• The Statistics pane will give you information about compressed files on Snow Leopard. (iDefrag always preserves compression.)

• The Inspector now shows more information about files.

• Creating a boot disk with iDefrag can be done via a menu option within iDefrag and should be simpler than using CDMaker.

• It is now a 64 bit application.

• The Optimize algorithm can now deal with volumes that have very little, or heavily fragmented, free space (and the “skip files…due to lack of free space” preference has been removed).

• New and improved look.

There are also numerous other great improvements that haven’t been mentioned.

If you’d like to try out the demonstration version, please download it (limited to very small disk images).

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

So we know you’re all dying to know how much money we raised for Indie+Relief.

Well, we’ve had a record couple of days’ sales, and we’re pleased to announce that we were able to donate some £7,000 to Oxfam earlier today (in case you’re wondering, we rounded up). For our American customers, that’s somewhere in the region of $11,400! This is great news and we hope it’s a big help to the people of Haiti.

We’d like to thank you, our customers, for taking up the Indie+Relief offer so enthusiastically and allowing us to donate such a stunning amount of money to charity. We’d also like to thank Justin Williams of Second Gear and Garrett Murray for organising and running Indie+Relief, and all the other Mac and iPhone developers who gave their time, money and sales to take part.

The total amount raised should appear on the Indie+Relief site some time soon, but it’s already clear from the numbers other Mac and iPhone developers have made public that Indie+Relief has been a resounding success.

We’ve just released what is hopefully the last Beta version of iDefrag 2. We hope to release the new version very soon.

Anybody who purchased iDefrag recently or purchases between now and when we release it, will get a free upgrade.

If you want to try it, get it here (8.7 MB).

As with the previous Beta versions, free stuff to anyone who reports problems we don’t know about.¹ Many thanks to those of you who have reported problems with the earlier versions.

Release notes can be found on our feed which is different to our iDefrag 1 feed so please subscribe to that feed to stay on top of iDefrag 2 releases. Note that the link above will only work in a browser that supports ATOM feeds, such as Safari.

Please remember that even though this is a fairly mature beta version, this is still pre-release software, so please back up first, just in case something goes wrong.

Please send comments about this release to our support team.

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free upgrades and free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

All of us over the past few days have borne witness, thanks to reports from the international media, to the terrible tragedy unfolding in Haiti as a result of the recent earthquake.

We wanted to do our bit to help, so as a result, on January 20th 2010, we will be taking part in Indie+Relief and will donate all of our sales to charity (in our case, the money is going to Oxfam).

The more observant amongst you will notice that January 20th starts at different times depending on where you are on the planet; as a result, we intend to donate all sales starting at 12:00 UTC on the 19th and ending at 12:00 UTC on the 21st. While it’s January 20th anywhere, on our site your money will go to charity.

Furthermore, to encourage you to purchase from us, we’re offering a special 10% Indie+Relief discount for this period. Don’t worry though—this discount won’t affect the amount that goes to charity, because we’ll add it back to the amount we donate.

The upshot? You get to donate to charity and you get great software, all for less than the usual price of the software alone.

p.s. Lots of other developers are taking part in Indie+Relief. A list of participants should be available there soon.

As a result of someone listing the beta version on MacUpdate and Version Tracker, we’re getting a lot of queries about the purported “release” of version 2.0 of iDefrag.

To be clear: version 2.0 of iDefrag has not been released.

We would appreciate it if those responsible for the listings on MacUpdate and VersionTracker would please not add beta versions on those websites. We’re presently trying to get the listings removed as they’re creating confusion for our customers and generating a lot of support traffic at a time when we have limited resources because of the festive period.

We’re pleased to announce the second Beta version of iDefrag 2.

As with the previous Beta, we’re offering a free upgrade and a free license for iPartition to anybody that reports a bug that we don’t already know about.¹ Many thanks to those of you who reported problems with the first Beta.

Changes from 2.0.0b1:

• Updated help.
• Added Defragment File menu command.
• Added an Auto unit.
• Log everything to iDefrag.log rather than the Console and hfs.log.
• Improved behaviour if you cancel authorisation when using the Defragment File feature.
• Fixed it so that you can download templates to create a boot disk.
• Double clicking on the splitter thumb will now resize to the optimum size.
• Added an installation prompt at the beginning where it will ask if you want to install iDefrag in your Applications folder (when appropriate).
• Fixed it so that it will work for French users although some things will not be translated.
• Added code to keep the Files tab updated when using the Quick algorithm or the Defragment File feature.
• Fixed a number of issues for users on Tiger.
• Shutdown when complete should now work when restarted in the special mode.

You can download this Beta version here: iDefrag-2.0.0b2 (8MB). If you are not already logged in, you will be prompted for your username (your e-mail address) and password for our site.

Note that this is a pre-release version, it will not have undergone as much testing as our released versions, and as a result there may be nasty bugs lurking somewhere in the code, so please back up first, just in case.

Please send comments about this release to our support team. We’ll be taking it relatively easy over the next couple of weeks so you might not get a response until the new year.

Happy holidays!

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free upgrades and free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

We’re pleased to announce the first Beta version of iDefrag 2. We’re making this available to all existing users of iDefrag.

As an incentive to try it out, we’re offering a free upgrade and a free license for iPartition to anybody that reports a bug that we don’t already know about.¹

New features:

• You can now run the offline algorithms without needing to create a boot disk. iDefrag can now reboot into a special mode where it has exclusive access to the disk.

• We’ve added the ability to defragment a single file.

• The online algorithm will now reliably skip files that are in use (regardless of whether or not they are using file locking).

• The Statistics pane will give you information about compressed files on Snow Leopard. (iDefrag always preserves compression.)

• The Inspector now shows more information about files.

• Creating a boot disk with iDefrag can be done via a menu option within iDefrag and should be simpler than using CDMaker.

• It is now a 64 bit application.

• The Optimize algorithm can now deal with volumes that have very little, or heavily fragmented, free space (and the “skip files…due to lack of free space” preference has been removed).

There are also a number of other improvements that haven’t been mentioned.

You can download this Beta version here: iDefrag-2.0.0b1 (10MB). If you are not already logged in, you will be prompted for your username (your e-mail address) and password for our site.

Note that this is a pre-release version, it will not have undergone as much testing as our released versions, and as a result there may be nasty bugs lurking somewhere in the code, so please back up first, just in case.

Please send comments about this release to our support team.

1. We’ll be reasonable about the free upgrades and free licenses, but we reserve the right to rescind the offer at any time, and we also reserve the right to determine what is or is not a bug. Basically, if you help us, we’ll give you the free stuff, but if hundreds all report the same bug, some will end up being disappointed. Our decision is final.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.7.2 of iDefrag, which is a bug fix release for users of version 1.7.1.

For full release notes, see the iDefrag news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iDefrag menu.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

Please note: we have now dropped support for Panther (10.3) and PowerPC G3 machines so please do not try and upgrade if this applies to you.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.2.0 of iPartition, which is mainly a bug fix release for users of iPartition 3.1.4, although we have added support for putting journals on external drives (this is only supported officially on Snow Leopard OS X Server).

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

Please note: we have now dropped support for Panther (10.3) and PowerPC G3 machines so please do not try and upgrade if this applies to you.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We have added support for Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode (aka 3-D Secure) to our site; increasingly, card schemes are requiring support for these authentication systems, and in fact it is no longer possible to accept some Maestro cards without them.

We realise that some customers may find their card issuer’s implementation of these schemes frustrating, but it is important to realise that any complaints should be addressed to your card issuer. In an ideal world, your issuer will supply you with a “hardware token” or a smart card reader of some description (as some U.K. banks are already doing) and the prompt from your card issuer will either automatically verify the physical presence of your card, or will prompt for a generated PIN that you can read off the device they have given you.

Most issuers presently are using passwords, which is perhaps not the ideal user experience. If you have difficulty with or dislike your card issuer’s implementation of 3-D Secure, we suggest that you get in touch with them directly and inquire about the possibility of them using hardware tokens or smart card readers.

A few customers have reported crashes with version 1.7.0 of iDefrag. We’ve tracked down the cause and fixed it in this update. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this has caused some of our customers. This bug annoyingly slipped through our testing.

For full release notes, see the iDefrag news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iDefrag menu.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.7.0 of iDefrag.

This is a bug fix release and should be fine to run on Snow Leopard. For full release notes, see the iDefrag news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iDefrag menu.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

Please note that we have now dropped support for using iDefrag whilst running from OS X versions earlier than 10.4.11. You can still use iDefrag on volumes that have earlier versions installed; we have just dropped support when you’re running from them. We’ve also dropped support for PowerPC G3 machines.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.4 of iPartition, which is a bug fix release for users of iPartition 3.1.3.

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

We have also released a new version of CDMaker which should be able to create templates from Snow Leopard installation DVDs. If you need it, select “Check for Updates…” in the menu.

Alternatively, you can download directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

UPDATE: We have now released an update to iPartition and iDefrag Lite. We are still working on the iDefrag update.

There are a few known minor issues with Snow Leopard:

1. Snow Leopard uses compression for some files. If these become fragmented and you use the Quick (on-line) algorithm to defragment them, they will become uncompressed. Until we release an update we advise you not to use the Quick (on-line) algorithm.
2. In the Info window, iDefrag will display zero for the size of compressed files and they will have no data fork. This is just a display issue.
3. Both iDefrag and iPartition will crash at launch time when running on a 64 bit kernel. By default, only the latest Xserve machines will be running the 64 bit Kernel so it should not affect many people. You can easily work around this by booting with the 32 bit kernel instead: hold down the 3 and the 2 keys as you power on the machine.

Please be aware that it’s perfectly fine to run iDefrag on a volume that has Snow Leopard installed whilst booted from a volume that has an earlier version of OS X, and that includes any bootable DVDs you might have made. The issues above still remain though i.e. you still shouldn’t run the on-line algorithm on a Snow Leopard volume until we’ve issued an update.

We will be releasing updates to iPartition and iDefrag soon that should address these issues. Please report any other issues to us via our support team.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.3 of iPartition, which is a bug fix release for users of iPartition 3.1.2.

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

It is our intention to discontinue all official support for OS X 10.3 in the near future. When this happens, while we will not intentionally break our products on that platform, if it is not possible (even via CDMaker) to use them we will not consider this to be a bug and instead will ask customers to upgrade to a newer release of Mac OS X. Additionally the system requirements on our website will be updated to reflect this change.

We welcome feedback from any affected customers on this issue, though we do note that the reason for dropping 10.3 support is that it is a significant extra testing and maintenance burden and we believe that relatively few customers will be adversely affected by the change.

Note that, of course, anyone already using our software on a system with 10.3 will be able to continue to use the versions that they are presently using; the change will only apply to new releases.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.2 of iPartition.

For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.6.9 of iDefrag.

This is a bug fix release. For full release notes, see the iDefrag news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iDefrag menu.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

Those of you attending WWDC next week may spot a couple of our developers wandering around. Feel free to say hello; we’re quite an approachable bunch.

We often see claims on the Internet that fragmentation isn’t a problem on Mac OS X. We don’t believe that (and indeed, we use iDefrag here ourselves), but past experience suggests that our attempts to refute it are simply labelled as partisan and biased by the highly vocal anti-defragmentation camp.

Anyway, one of our customers today sent us a link to a screenshot showing 6,171 fragments in his swapfile, with the consequent effect on system performance that such a thing implies.

There’s no doubt that HFS+ is better than some other filesystems at avoiding fragmentation, but it certainly isn’t immune. Ironically even SSDs, where you would expect the uniform access time to render fragmentation a problem of the past, still have various problems caused by exactly the same issue¹.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.6.8 of iDefrag.

This is a bug fix release. For full release notes, see the iDefrag news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iDefrag menu.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.