SizeWell Not Working On Anything Besides Finder

Lecraeman shared this question 10 years ago
Answered

I don't know why, but for some reason the menu for SizeWell(When clicking the "+" icon)will NOT show up on ANYTHING besides finder. I tried it on Skype, and Minecraft. I have yet to find anything like this plugin, so I am hoping you guys can help me. I set it to show on everything in my settings...I'm not sure what I am doing wrong :(

Replies (2)

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It is also working on Safari, but still not on the other applications.

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Thanks for getting in touch.


I should be more clear about the state of SizeWell and the current versions of OS X.


In short, SizeWell can no longer fully support all apps for reasons out of my control.


Now, in detail...


A big part of the issue is that SizeWell relies on SIMBL, which seems to no longer be supported or actively developed.


The latest version of SIMBL does not load into any Sandboxed applications. Briefly, Sandboxing is a security measure to limit application access to the whole system. Sandboxing was introduced in Lion and is now required by all apps distributed through the Mac App Store. Developers distributing outside of the Mac App Store are also encouraged to use Sandboxing, it is a great security measure for the safety of the end user, but in normal use, users won't know the difference between a Sandboxes and non-Sandboxed application.


The applications that SizeWell is working for you in, such as Finder, Safari, Google Chrome, etc. are NOT Sandboxed, therefore SIMBL can load plugins into them.


Again, for all Sandboxed apps, SIMBL simply does not load plugins into them.


There is a SIMBL alternative that I have investigated called EasySIMBL which does seem to support Sandboxed applications, so it appears to be technically possible for SIMBL to be updated to work with Sandboxed apps.


At this point, the current version of SizeWell is not aware of EasySIMBL exactly, but I have played around with supporting it. Sadly, EasySIMBL has another set of support issues.


EasySIMBL does not load into any apps that use Garbage Collected Memory Management. Now this may be greek to you, but it's just to say that there are another set of apps that EasySIMBL cannot support. In this group of Garbage Collected apps is Safari, so its a huge trade-off in support.


I've tried having both EasySIMBL and SIMBL installed simultaneously in the hope that even though its kind of ridiculous SIMBL would load into X apps and EasySIMBL would load into Y apps offering full support to load SizeWell... but, no such luck. These two things were not made to work together simultaneously, so one overrides the other and all apps cannot be supported by SizeWell with this setup.


So, because of this stalemate that is out of my control, SizeWell development has been at something of a standstill.


I have a small update for SizeWell that I have been tinkering with, but without being able to offer full support on the latest versions of OS X, I'm not sure it's really worth it to continue investing time in SizeWell.


Anyway, I'm sorry I can't give better news, but that's the situation. I wish things were different, but there's not much of anything I can do other than hope that someone continues development on SIMBL or a SIMBL alternative.


But, thank you so much for your interest in SizeWell. There are other apps out there that offer some great window zooming features, but SizeWell does have it's own unique qualities that others haven't matched.


That being said, I suggest taking a look into "Divvy" or "Moom", both available on the Mac App Store. While offering similar features, they are implemented in an entirely way which allows them to support any and all apps, even on the latest versions of OS X.


I could go into how their implementation is different that what I did with SizeWell and why I didn't and am not going to recreate SizeWell in the way that these other apps are implemented, but that is a different story.


I hope this helps you understand the situation, I'm sorry if its a bit dense or there are typos, I wrote it out real quick and am about to head out the door. I'll be back later if you have any further questions and may edit this reply for future readers.


Thanks again for getting in touch!

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