This web video downloader has quite literally been in my Applications folder for years — my go to YouTube + Flash + funky (i.e. .wmv) file conversion app. Interestingly, unlike other downloaders, which come and (mostly) go with the wind, developer TastyApps keeps making VideoBox better.

Videobox allows you to quickly and easily download Flash video from most all of the popular video sites on the internet. Videobox will convert the video into a native Quicktime format so it’s ready to view on your Mac, iPod, iPhone or iTunes.

VideoBox 3.9 is now available and comes to market with the following fixes (no new features) baked in:

• The delay after which the mini-browser shows-up if no clips are detected on a page is now controllable in the preferences.
• Dragging the thumbnail image would not work anymore. Fixed.
• On 32-bits Macs, the flash plugin would not load inside the application. Fixed.
• Some preferences were not properly saved. Fixed.

Get your copy of VideoBox 3.9 (15-day trial) here

One less cat to care for

Failing kidneys? Bad hips? Whatever the case, TastyApps has said it would drop Leopard support in all of its apps last month. Obviously, that deadline has come and gone, and the latest VideoBox update still sports OS X 10.5.x compatibility.

“The problem is always that at some point, supporting older versions of the Mac OS limits us in the new features we can add for users of the newer OS versions – so it’s a fine balance between the number of users of older OSes and the value of the new features we are putting off…” writes Jean Le Clerc, cook, TastyApps. “And now Apple is making it quite clear that 10.5 is not a OS they want to support much longer: in their latest version of XCode, the programming environment they give us developers, Mac OS X 10.5 is not an option.”

So, consider yourself forewarned — from here on out future VideoBox, Tidy, MusicBox and WebSnapper updates will be for Macs running OS X 10.6 and up.

That said, Leopard was released in October 2007, so it’s not yet five years old. Generally speaking, Apple supports operating system versions for a half decade after release, but we’ve had few if any patches or updates for the company’s last fully PPC compatible OS since Lion shipped — c’est la vie, c’est la mort.

Again, OS X 10.5 support is still there, but don’t look for more updates…

Ready for a new Mac or one not quite so old?