Rebound! for PowerKey Pro 4.3.1
January 10, 2005
Rebound!® is the centerpiece of the PowerKey Pro "Admin" upgrade; it expands PowerKey's features by adding automatic crash detection and recovery. Rebound! watches USB Macs for system and application crashes, and uses the PowerKey unit to automatically restart the computer when they occur. To learn more about Rebound!, check out the Help system on the PowerKey CD, or click the "?" button in the Rebound! control panel.
Rebound! 4.3 introduces a rewritten background engine that improves compatibility with Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", adds the ability to control Rebound!'s crash detection settings from AppleScript, and includes some minor user interface tweaks and bug fixes. Version 4.3.1 fixes some minor bugs.
The Rebound! software is part of the PowerKey 4 package. The current version can be found on our web site at
<http://www.sophisticated.com/support/downloads/>
System requirements
Because it is based on the PowerKey 4 software, Rebound! 4 has the same system requirements as PowerKey. For more information, see the "Read Me -- PowerKey" document.
Installing Rebound!
To install (or uninstall) Rebound!, follow the instructions found in the "Read Me -- PowerKey" document.
Using Rebound!
To configure your crash detection settings, open the "Rebound!" control panel application.
An extensive help system is available from the "Help" menu or by clicking the "?" icon in the window.
Known issues
- In Mac OS X 10.1, when the PowerKey software is reinstalled with old preferences still present, the control panel will appear in its background state until quit and relaunched. This behavior is due to a system bug which was fixed by version 10.1.3.
Revision history
1.7.1 -- 1/10/05
- In Mac OS 9, if the help files weren't found, the control panel window didn't appear -- fixed.
4.3 -- 12/23/04
- Background software updated to match PowerKey 4.3.
- Added the ability to control system and application crash detection with AppleScript.
- Reworded the "restart after a power failure" feature in the control panel to be more clear.
- The "help" button now matches other applications in the version of the operating system being used.
- Due to recent changes in Mac OS X, application timers appeared with invalid names -- fixed.
- Discovered a tiny memory leak in Apple's code to set the Energy Saver preferences. Modified our code that sets the "start up after power failure" setting only if necessary to mitigate this.
- In rare circumstances, if a daily restart is specified but has not yet occurred, shutting down the computer will cause Rebound! to think it has crashed, and it will initiate a crash restart -- fixed.
- In Mac OS X 10.1.x and 10.2.x, the first time you opened the Rebound! control panel after upgrading from a previous version, the System Crashes and Other panels sometimes were empty -- fixed.
- In Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", Rebound! could only be configured by the first user logged in; if additional users logged in using fast user switching, their changes would not be saved -- fixed; the background software has been rewritten to work better in a multi-user environment.
- Added checks when reading and writing schedules to ensure that they haven't been corrupted. If a corrupted schedule is found, Rebound! displays a warning and reverts to a default (empty) schedule.
- Fixed a tiny memory leak that occurred when updating events in the hardware.
- If the system clock was set before 2001 (as can happen when a computer with a dead clock battery is unplugged), the PowerKey unit(s) wouldn't be recognized, and scheduled restarts wouldn't run -- fixed.
- In rare circumstances, when the software failed to initialize communication with the hardware (due to a data corruption in the hardware), the software would crash -- fixed; now the software exits more gracefully.
4.2 -- 10/24/03
- Background software updated to match PowerKey 4.2.
- Added compatibility with Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" fast user switching.
- Added a dialog box to let you register your product, equivalent to that in the PowerKey control panel.
- Added a new "low-level" software restart method, which is initiated if a Finder restart fails.
- In Mac OS X, Rebound! now creates a separate log file in addition to posting log messages to syslog. Clicking the "View Log" button opens this new log file. Also, several log messages were reworded to make them more clear.
- After an application crash or during a scheduled restart, PowerKey's hardware timer is now set to the "Time allowed for system to restart" value instead of the "Restart if system doesn't respond" value.
- If the "BSD Subsystem" was not installed in a Mac OS X installation, the Rebound! background software could not be installed, because gzip wasn't available -- fixed; now we just put the background software in a tar archive.
- In rare circumstances, a corruption in the EEPROM in the PowerKey unit would cause the Rebound! background software to fail at startup -- fixed; now the software clears the EEPROM if it detects the corruption.
4.0.4 -- 3/14/02
- Background software updated to match PowerKey 4.1.4.
4.0.3 -- 2/13/02
- Background software updated to match PowerKey 4.1.3.
- In rare circumstances, the PowerKey unit would not save the activator code when the Admin upgrade was installed -- fixed.
4.0.1 -- 10/17/02
- Background software updated to support forthcoming iDo Script Scheduler 1.5 features.
- Added a "self-install" feature to the Mac OS X version. Now the software can be installed simply by opening the control panel, with no restart required.
- Added logging of power failure restarts, and more information when logging crashes.
- Control panel now displays NFR or Evaluation info, if present.
4.0 -- 5/30/02
First release. Completely rewritten to use the PowerKey engine.
How to reach us
Sophisticated Circuits, Inc.
PO Box 727
Bothell, WA 98041-0727
e-mail: ,
phone: 425-485-7979
web: <http://www.sophisticated.com/>
Copyright ©2002-2004 Sophisticated Circuits, Inc. All rights reserved.
The files in this package may not be redistributed in any way without express permission from Sophisticated Circuits, Inc.
PowerKey, Rebound!, Kick-off! and iDo are registered trademarks of Sophisticated Circuits, Inc. All other products mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners.