Showed off RapidWeaver at #kwdesignmeetup
Last night I had the opportunity to demonstrate Realmac Software’s RapidWeaver to an attentive group of web designers and developers at the Waterloo Region Web Design and Technology Group. Here is the video from that presentation. While unrehearsed and rather rough, the response was still very positive so I thought I would share it here for posterity.
RapidWeaver 4.3 Is Now Available!
Realmac Software has just announced this morning that RapidWeaver 4.3, their anticipated Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 update, has been released. Initially caught off guard when Apple released the update to the Mac operating system nearly one month ahead of schedule, the dedicated team at Realmac Software have been going full bore to get RapidWeaver to run rock solid on Snow Leopard.
RapidWeaver 4.3 comes with many new features and numerous bug fixes, some of which include:
- Snow Leopard compatibility
- Added the ability to add and edit links in Styled Text views via the right-click contextual menu
- The right-click contextual menu now exposes the default commands for searching Google & Spotlight, Dictionary lookup, suggested spellings
- RapidWeaver now uploads all the assets relating to a site, and then uploads the pages themselves to ensure that pages display correctly when published
- Google Analytics code is no longer output when previewing within RapidWeaver to prevent pageview number inconsistencies
- No longer bounces the dock icon when publishing completes
- Fix for a bug where a plugin failing to load could leave RW in an unknown state
- Shortcut keys added to link panel (command-1/2/3)
- Shortcut keys added to site setup sheet (command-1/2/3)
- Fixed a bug where editing the meta tags or page assets in the page inspector didn’t mark the page as changed
- For full details of the extensive updates read Realmac’s release notes
If you’ve recently updated to Snow Leopard then you’ll want to download this very important RapidWeaver update.
The seyDesign 3rd Birthday Sale!
As one of my Twitter peeps put it this morning, “There’s not many companies nowadays that can celebrate a third birthday!” For this fact, we know we are truly blessed to be doing what we are doing. Surrounded by friends, colleagues and the best software community in the universe, seyDesign.com has enjoyed an incredible 3 year run as RapidWeaver theme developer.
To mark this momentous day, we are having a week long sale. From now until December 7th you can get 45% off your entire shopping cart (minimum 2 products) when you use the code:
birthday2008
Are you a seyDesign member yet? Members can enjoy an even better discount! Sign up to learn more.
FormLoom could answer many dreams
RapidWeaver, as great as it is, has always had one or two week points. Fortunately, through the wonderful foresight of Realmac Software developers, they have a wonderful SDK and strongly encourage add-on development (plugins, themes and applications developed from beyond the walls of Realmac Software). Some add-ons add features and functions never imagined in-house, while others simply improve upon existing plugins and exceed expectations of the original.
And that is the case of FormLoom (announced here) which takes the idea of the built in RapidWeaver Form plugin and and puts it in a whole other universe. Now consider that the original RapidWeaver form plugin has been plagued with many issues over the years and has been missing certain many rudimentary features. It’s the kind of plugin that requires a great deal of attention, with server side programming, keeping things un-hackable, striping tags, etc… With everything else that RMS has going on, this little plugin has probably been a sore in their side. FormLoom is just what was needed in my view. It does (or will do) everything that a form plugin ought to do with the technology that it should be doing it with. In short, the forms it generates are proper web apps.
I have yet to get my hands on a copy but I am most certain that I will be able to put this thing into some heavy rotation. Go check it out for yourself.
We’re back and ready to roll.
We are back from or little vacay, and back on the horse, if you will, working through a pile of emails and such. On our agenda this week is to address a few bug issues in some of our RapidWeaver themes, namely a footer issue in wideNas, and a couple of mystery bugs that occasionally rear their head in cataLog and Acumen. We should have all of these addressed this week with their respective update installers ready for download.
And as always we are ever moving forward and onward with the theme developments and ideas. We have quite a list of them to get through over the next year or so so you can be sure to see one or two new themes from us every month. Yes that is an ambitious plan, but this is what we do after all, we might very well be the only full time RapidWeaver theme developers now who do nothing else.
And speaking of RapidWeaver, did you notice that RapidWeaver 4.2 has been released? Yes indeed. I have not yet tried it myself, but I have downloaded it and will be getting into it shortly. Learn more about it’s release here.
We’re off to London!
I’m off to the UK for a bit of a holiday. We take flight at 9:40 pm October 23 (that’s today) and will be gone for about 10 days. We’ll be back to answer your support questions on the week of November 1st. Remember that if you have any major concerns between now and then you can always try posting them the the Realmac Software forum and I am sure one of the kind and knowledgeable folks there will help straighten you out enough until I get back.
We’ll try to keep you posted on our daily outings. That’s likely to occur on Twitter so if your inclined to keep tabs on the leisure time of a theme developer geek like myself then you can come follow me.
Anyhow, stay safe and we’ll catch in a few days time.
seyDoggy on holiday until August 11th
As all hard working people should, we are set to take a few days holidays to rest and recoup some positive energy, inspiration and innovation. We’ll come back in a weeks time right as rain and set to make more great products for you. You can expect us back in the office chair ready to face RapidWeaver, TextMate and PlistEdit Pro for another round of RapidWeaver themes, updates, open source and support on or close to August 11th.
In the meantime, lets make the wait worth while. Let’s have a “seyDoggy-is-taking-a-holiday” sale! In fact, let’s use “holiday” as the discount code. From now until August 11th, use the discount code “holiday” and get 35% off your entire shopping cart! Isn’t that fun? I knew you’d think so.
From August 3rd to August 11th, get 35% off your entire purchase when you use the code “holiday” in your shopping cart.
Tragic news
I read in my RSS reader this morning some terrible news that one of our own has suffered a great, unimaginable loss. Ron Shiver, father of Adam Shiver of Elixir Graphics, passed away a few days before Christmas. He was 52, right around the age of my own parents; so sudden and unexpected. I am at a loss for words for anything meaningful to say but I am reminded of a quote said to me when my grandfather passed on, one which I was able to find again:
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
~Marcel Proust
If you wish to extend your sympathy to Adam, I’ve set up a thread on the RapidWeaver Support forum here.
New RapidWeaver resource launched today
A new site by seyDoggy called RW Updates has been launched today. The site, a daily digest of RapidWeaver developer news, is aimed at power RapidWeaver users looking to cut to the chase and get development news on theme and plugin updates, new products, new snippets and new smart blocks right from the developers mouths.
RW Updates allows visitor to quickly skim through what’s been posted by their favorite RapidWeaver developers, Realmac Software and also the Add-ons section of the Realmac Software site without having to wade through countless forum posts, countless feeds and surf countless sites. RW Updates gives you a light recap of what’s new, quick and easy.
Realmac Software Release RapidWeaver 3.6.3
Brighton, England – September 19th, 2007 – Realmac Software today announced an update to RapidWeaver, its award-winning website creation application for Mac OS X.
RapidWeaver 3.6.3 sees numerous improvements to the application, including:
- Greatly improved memory usage when exporting websites
- Fixed an issue with using the bold and colour attributes on a string
- Fixed some issues with the main view displaying incorrectly
- Option-Double Clicking on photos now opens the files in a Photo Album
along with various other fixes and enhancements.
For an in-depth list of new features please visit: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/ or the new http://iloverapidweaver.com/ website, designed by Realmac Software to evangelize RapidWeaver on the web.
Pricing & Availability
RapidWeaver 3.6.3 is a free upgrade for registered 3.6 users, and is priced at $49 for new users and just $25 for users of earlier versions. RapidWeaver 3.6.3 is available to download and buy from today.
System requirements
RapidWeaver is a Universal Binary, requiring Mac OS X v10.4.3 or later. A free trial copy of RapidWeaver can be downloaded from: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/
