Today, you can download brand new versions of almost all IOSPIRIT products: Remote Buddy 1.20, Remote Buddy Express 1.20, Candelair 1.9 and Remote Control Diagnostics 1.2.

Remote Buddy 1.20: control Rdio, Soundcloud, Chrome, QVIVO Player with your remote

The latest release adds support for controlling the aforementioned applications. It also includes Candelair 1.9 (read on for details) and a long list of other minor and major improvements and bugfixes in almost all areas. The Express version also receives an update.

Candelair 1.9: iMac® 2011 compatibility, new Apple® IR emulation, end-of-life for the legacy compatibility mode

A few users of iMac® 2011 models reported issues when putting their Mac® through a sleep/wake cycle under OS X® Lion: the Apple® Remote sometimes no longer was available after that. This issue was particularly hard to address because I couldn't reproduce it. Thanks to the help of affected users, though, I could identify and address the issue. Candelair 1.9 addressed the issue on the systems of all users involved.

The Apple® IR emulation (also known as "Virtual Remote" in Remote Buddy) also received a major update and now exactly mimics the original Apple® IR Receiver on systems running a 64 Bit kernel as well. This re-establishes full compatibility with applications whose Apple® Remote code still depends on undocumented driver internals.

Of course, depending on undocumented driver internals is never a good idea. Which maybe was best illustrated with the release of OS X® 10.4.9, again with 10.5 - and again with 10.6.2. All of these releases changed driver internals. All applications depending on them broke. Each time with consequences ranging from Apple® Remote support not working in just the applications in question to rendering the Apple® Remote unusable systemwide. Previous versions of Candelair provided a Legacy Compatibility mode that allowed applications depending on OS X® 10.5 driver internals to continue to work under OS X® 10.6.2 and beyond. It was meant to give application developers additional time to switch to driver and OS version independent code like the HIDRemote class. A change that should require a developer less than half an hour of work - including testing. Many developers used this opportunity. Others didn't - and probably never will.

To further simplify and streamline Candelair, version 1.9 therefore removes the Legacy Compatibility mode. If this is a problem for one of the apps you're using, please get in touch with their respective developer. Adopting the HIDRemote class is easy.

Remote Control Diagnostics 1.2

Recognition and correct handling of the new Apple IR driver as well as minor visual tweaks best describe the changes in this new version of Remote Control Diagnostics.