Monthly Archives: December 2006

MacSanta and Wii Transfer 1.5

“Wii Transfer”:http://www.riverfold.com/software/wiitransfer/ is now listed as part of the “MacSanta promotion”:http://www.macsanta.com/. Only $7 through Christmas day!

I also released Wii Transfer 1.5 late last night. The major change in this version is support for automatically backing up saved game data files from an SD card. The Nintendo Wii by default does not save games to SD cards, but it’s easy in the Wii settings interface to copy your saved games to an SD card or restore later. If Wii Transfer is running when you insert an SD card into your Mac, it will automatically copy the saved games to your hard drive (in Application Support), organizing them by date. Then there’s a simple UI for restoring the games back to an SD card. “Here’s a short screencast”:http://www.riverfold.com/software/wiitransfer/screencast_backup.mov if you are curious what it looks like.

One neat part of this that I was able to do — and this is consistent with the whole point of Wii Transfer, improving the experience of transferring Wii data — is to show the real game names in the restore list. The data files actually use a 4-character code, but “WiiSave.com”:http://www.wiisave.com/ is maintaining a list of codes to real names. I’ve baked a portion of that list into Wii Transfer 1.5, and the application also automatically downloads an updated list from the Riverfold web site so that as new games are released, Wii Transfer will know about them.

Now head over to “MacSanta”:http://www.macsanta.com/ and pick up some great Mac applications, all 20% off.

Re-introducing Wii Transfer

I guess it’s a sign I’m not blogging very often when I don’t even announce my own product! A big thanks to “Dan Benjamin”:http://hivelogic.com/ and “John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/ for linking up “Wii Transfer”:http://www.riverfold.com/software/wiitransfer/, a little application I quietly rolled out last night. (I’d thank the other links too but I’m still sorting through referrers for today. Maybe it’s time to buy “Mint”:http://www.haveamint.com/.)

Wii Transfer started as a weekend hack to make the process of converting QuickTime movies to more Wii-friendly codecs much smoother. Not many hours into it I realized there are a bunch of useful features I could build around the Wii. Rather than work on it for a few months leading up to a big 1.0 release (all the while not knowing if it would be well-received), I borrowed a little “less software”:http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php and brought it to the point that it was generally useful and worth paying for.

This kind of quick iteration is great because it means tonight I can announce version 1.2. There are a handful of minor improvements, but the two big new features are AppleScript support and an interface for quickly opening video podcasts from iTunes.

Overall this has been a really fun process and I’m interested to see where it goes from here. I will write more about Riverfold, the company, in a later blog post.