UPDATE: It turns out that Espionage *is* compatible with Logitech, but only the latest version (2.7 as of this writing). Espionage version 2.1 and later will check for this and will not complain if it detects that you have LCC 2.7 or later installed.
We’ve received two reports so far of Espionage starting up but not showing the main window, and in both cases we tracked the problem down to Logitech’s Control Center (LCC), which is notorious in its reputation for breaking various software.
The problem is that LCC installs Unsanity’s Application Enhancer to run their “LCC Scroll Enhancer”. This piece of software will load into just about every application you run and mess with its code, so it’s not surprising that this has given many developer’s headaches.
If you experience these symptoms the best thing to do for now is to uninstall LCC and consider one of the many other solutions out there. I personally recommend USB Overdrive, it works great with my Logitech keyboard & Microsoft mouse.
I used to use LCC myself as I have a Logitech keyboard that I rather like but have since uninstalled it because of the problems I experienced with it. I don’t remember if it has a convenient uninstaller with it (something that I made sure Espionage had), but once you’ve uninstalled it check to make sure the following files do not exist on your system:
/Library/InputManagers/LCC Scroll Enhancer Loader
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/LCC Scroll Enhancer
If they do just move them to the trash and restart your computer. After that Espionage should load up just fine. We plan on investigating this in more detail to see if we can somehow make Espionage work with LCC, but until then this is probably the best solution, as it’s likely it could fix other “broken” applications on your system.
This is not an option. I do not want to choose between the two apps. It is too easy to say “uninstall the other party’s software”.
I will buy Espionage (that I really like) when LCC is compatible with it.
Please understand, what LCC is doing is very unethical, imagine if you owned a car and bought an iPod adapter for it. Except this adapter does not work the normal way by drawing power from the cigarette lighter, instead, it rips out the car’s generator and plugs directly into the engine to get its power. The car then stops working as it normally should. Would you expect the car manufacturer to redesign the car so that their adapter works? This (granted, imperfect) example is essentially what Logitech is doing. We have a long list of improvements to add to Espionage, and we simply do not have the time right now to rewrite it so that LCC can safely mess with its internals, although if we do find a way we will certainly consider it.
For more discussion on this topic, I think some of the comments in this blog post are insightful.
Isn’t it more correct to state that it used to install APE, but is now a input manager hack
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/04/15/lcc
?
At least, I can’t find any APE related files where I expect them to be on my mac.
Hi Tor, that’s interesting, we’ll have to look into that to see if that is indeed the case. Thanks for pointing that out!
I have a logitech Revolution mouse on my 8-core tower and on my MacBookPro and it works with all of my programs. Your software sounded like a better solution to my current use of encrypted disk images but if your software does not work with logitech you can forget it. I’m not even going to give your product a shot.
You are welcome to try Espionage with the latest version of LCC and see if it works for you.
Right now our priorities are focused at getting Espionage ready for Snow Leopard and adding various features, and as we are a tiny company we must focus on a limited number of tasks at a time. When we get to it we’ll take a look and see if we can improve Espionage’s compatibility with LCC, in the meantime you are welcome to try it, but keep in mind that for now this is not officially supported.
Good news, we had some time to research this issue in depth and it looks like Espionage *is* compatible with LCC, just not any versions of LCC prior to 2.7. Versions of LCC prior to that had a rather serious bug that was not only responsible for breaking Espionage, but other applications as well. One other high-profile victim of this bug was Growl. The technical details are available here if you’re interested:
Make sure you have the latest version of Logitech Control Center installed (as of this writing it’s 2.7), prior to running Espionage. Then you can just ignore the pop up that appears when you run Espionage 2.0.8.
The next version of Espionage will have an automatic check for this, and if it detects that you have the latest version of LCC already it won’t complain.