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One HTML novice, a Mac and a website dream
I have a secret. I can't write HTML to save my life. For most people, that would be okay. But as a tech journalist, it's a bit embarrassing not to have fluency with the language that underlies the World Wide Web. My lack of HTML savvy is one reason why I loved Apple's old iWeb Mac web-composition app so much. Sure, the sites were a bit formulaic and clunky, but for someone who wanted more than a Facebook page, it was great. But when MobileMe's one-click hosting for iWeb went away, so did my site. [For readers who found themselves in the same hostless boat, Steve's tips on replacing the iWeb / MobileMe team are still valuable. –Ed.] But no longer. Though I still haven't learned HTML, I've decided I'm going to make the effort to create a new website based on the current crop of tools available on the Mac. Each month, I'll be using a different tool (be it an app, a Mac-only website builder or a hacked-together website from apps that aren't really meant to build websites). Along the way, I'll report on my journey, and I hope to get lots of feedback from those of you who were in a similar situation and tried different things. To start with, I'm going to try to design a version of my site using RealMac's capable RapidWeaver app and some pretty slick themes from designer Michael David. Next month, I'll report on how that went and show you my results; then I'll try to build the same site using different tools. In the end, I'll be able to know which Mac web tools are the best for folks like me, and which only say they are. You can follow all the posts in the series using our tag for My Mac Site. With all this in mind, I'd love to get your input on what you've found useful. Feel free to leave your comments below or tweet your advice to @michaelgrothaus.
MacLegion 2011 fall bundle now available
MacLegion has announced their fall bundle for 2011. This year's bundle features 10 Mac apps worth US$639 for the low price of $49.95. The apps in this year's bundle are: Corel Painter Essentials 4 RapidWeaver 5 BannerZest Pro 3 Postbox 2.5 DEVONthink Pro 2.2 Swift Publisher +Extras 2.3 Disk Drill Pro 1.4 CheckUp 3 Voila 3.1 Fumy 1.5 The sale runs until September 28, and the first 9,000 customers who buy the bundle also get a copy of CleanMyMac (a $29.95 value) for free. The MacLegion bundles also entitle buyers to full after-sales support as well as valid upgrade paths for software releases, just as if you had bought each app individually from the developers.
TUAW TV Live at 5 PM EDT: Alternatives to iWeb demoed
A few days ago, I published a list of ways that iWeb users could host their content away from MobileMe or move to other alternatives. Today on TUAW TV Live, I'll be demonstrating some of those alternatives for the audience. Whether you're looking at RapidWeaver as a replacement for iWeb, want a WYSIWYG HTML editor to maintain an existing iWeb site, or are thinking about moving to a web-based content management system like WordPress, I'll cover it this afternoon. I've used a lot of these tools over the years, so I'll give you my take on each of the apps or services as well. As usual, I'll be starting the show at 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT / 10 PM BST) sharp, and we'll take a few minutes to chat before the demos start. To join in on the chat and watch the live streaming video, drop by TUAW about five minutes before the start time to get your instructions on how to participate. If you're unable to join us for the show, remember that you can always subscribe to the video podcast and watch the show at your leisure in iTunes or any other favorite podcatching app. The past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel.
Ten ways to replace iWeb and MobileMe hosting
Yesterday, we reported on a rumor that Apple's website creation software, iWeb, is about a year away from obsolescence, along with MobileMe's hosting of iWeb sites. An iWeb user allegedly sent Apple CEO Steve Jobs an email asking if he should start looking for another website builder and a new host, and Jobs provided one of his patented terse replies: "Yep." In my post about this, I mentioned some alternatives that TUAW readers might want to look at. Here I'm going to take a more detailed look at several easy website creation tools and hosting alternatives, so that you can start making your plans to move away from iWeb and MobileMe. I will not be covering professional web design tools in this post, as iWeb is designed for easy creation of sites. Instead, all of the suggestions I'll make here are aimed at the folks who just want to create a relatively good-looking website quickly, without a lot of training. iWeb hosting via FTP If you want to keep using iWeb for a while but would like to move your iWeb site away from MobileMe hosting, then get yourself a domain name, get a web host, and start publishing via FTP. iWeb 3 made it possible to publish your website on a traditional web host. You set up the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) settings in iWeb's site publishing settings, and pressing the Publish Site button takes care of uploading graphics, text, and any changed pages to the host. Just about every major and minor web hosting provider supports FTP. Note that some of the standard iWeb features, including password protection, blog and photo comments, blog search and the hit counter don't work when you use FTP for publishing. The great thing about this solution is that you can just change the host for your website, point iWeb to the new host, and publish your same old site to the new location. Not much is lost in translation, and you won't need to go through a lot of redesign work. Unfortunately, iWeb probably won't be supported in the future and may eventually stop working with future releases of Mac OS X. The other negative? You'll need to pay for web hosting from one of the many hosting providers. You can also use your own Mac as a web server (no matter how old), but that's the subject of another post... iWeb hosting on Dropbox If you have a lightly-used iWeb site and don't feel like spending money on web hosting, consider getting a free Dropbox account and hosting your iWeb site there. I wrote some instructions on how to use Dropbox as your iWeb host a while back, so check them out. Advantages? You can continue using iWeb for a while longer. Disadvantages? Dropbox isn't designed for large-traffic web hosting, and might shut you down if your site is wildly popular. Likewise, if you have a huge and complex iWeb site with a lot of photos, you might go over the free 2 GB free storage limit and have to start paying for web hosting. Facebook Do you just want to have a "site" where you can post pictures and videos, let your friends know what you're doing, and get comments on your content? Then you may just want to move over to Facebook. It's free, and most of your friends and relatives are probably already using it. Facebook is fine for the new material you create, but how do you move your old posts to the land of Zuckerberg? It's probably not going to work very well. I can envision some sort of long session involving copying and pasting text to Facebook, but with the constantly changing wall of content on Facebook, your old content is going to be wiped off the wall fairly soon. If you have a lot of your iPhoto pics on your iWeb site, then you're in luck. Just open up iPhoto, put all of those iPhoto pics into an album, and then use Share > Facebook to move the photos into a Facebook album. What if you're looking for a more personal and unique site? That's where my next suggestions come in. WordPress / WordPress.com When I want to put a website or blog together quickly, I use WordPress. This blogging tool (content management system) has been around for years, and it is wildly popular. Over 14% of the top 1 million websites were created in WordPress, and the most recent major release of WordPress had been downloaded over 32.5 million times by February of 2011. There's even a professional version, WordPress VIP, which our sister site TechCrunch uses as its underlying CMS. WordPress is not a Mac application; rather, it is an AMP (Apache / MySQL / PHP) application that runs on a server (or on your Mac). You log into a dashboard from your favorite web browser, add content, change the look and feel of the site with themes and plugins, and then publish your changes. There's no need, as in iWeb, to make changes locally and then wait for your modifications to be uploaded to a server. For beginning WordPress bloggers, I recommend a free WordPress.com account. It's a great way to learn how WordPress works, all your content can be migrated to another WordPress host at a later date if necessary, and the fairly new step-by-step tutorials are an incredible way to learn all about this powerful content management system. If you decide to head out on your own, most major web hosting providers have one-click installers for WordPress. In other words, you sign up for a hosting plan, then say that you want WordPress installed. A few minutes later, you get an email from your WordPress site saying that you need to log in and create an administrative account. Do that, and you're on your way to blogging superstardom. Among the hosting providers that provide one-click installations of WordPress are Bluehost, DreamHost, MediaTemple, and GoDaddy. Note that you're going to have to pay for a hosting plan, so maybe the $99 you'll be saving every year by not renewing MobileMe will pay for your web hosting. WordPress is remarkably powerful, and a vast developer community is constantly creating new plugins to add functionality to the tool and designing new themes to make pages that are unique and beautiful. If you can't find a theme to your liking, there's always Artisteer, an app that you can use to easily create your own custom theme. iWeb users who might have set up a small shop using something like Google Checkout or PayPal buttons can actually get a real web commerce site going with WordPress. There are several plugins now available for WordPress that integrate with shopping cart services like FoxyCart. Finally, WordPress is an excellent way to get familiar with most content management systems. For anyone who has aspirations to become a professional blogger, starting with WordPress can get you familiar with the tools and workflow that you'll need to move on up the ladder. Tumblr Want a very easy to use and free way to host a website? Tumblr's a good start. You can sign up for free in minutes and be posting immediately after that. There's a selection of Tumblr themes -- none of which I found to my liking -- that you can choose from, and all you need to do to post is have a web browser or use an iOS app like Tumblr (Free) or QuickTumblr ($2.99, for iPad). As you can see from the Tumblr dashboard screenshot above, once you've logged into your account you have a choice of what you can post. Each one of these buttons leads to a data entry page that you can use to post a specific type of content. On Tumblr, you can create some social engagement by choosing other tumblelogs to follow, or by liking/favoriting posts which you can quote or reblog on your own site. Tumblr's bookmarklet and email posting tools are pretty snazzy, and they make it easy to clip and share popular links or videos. You can call in posts from your cellphone, if you like blogging in audio format. We even have a TUAW Tumblr for material that might not be suitable for the main site. I personally don't like the vibe or feel of Tumblr, which is why I use the next tool for some personal posting. Posterous The only thing you need to start a Posterous blog is an email account. Why? Because you can actually do a lot of your posting by just sending emails to a special Posterous address. You can also use the web-based editor with Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or any other modern web browser to update your information. Posterous is completely free, and there's also a free iPhone app for posting on the run. I've been using Posterous on and off for three years for my personal blog, and I really like it. There are some great themes -- the current one I'm using uses a grid of fifteen photos to show the last fifteen posts, and it works very well on an iPad. Speaking of the iPad, I recently found out that I can use the handy Writing Kit app ($4.99) to write posts in Markdown and then email 'em to Posterous for publishing. It also has some of the same posting options as Tumblr, and it offers a Groups feature for collaboration & sharing among friends or family. [Since it's graduation season, don't miss the Posterous "instant collaborative photo album" trick, which leverages the geolocation features of the Posterous iPhone app to cluster pictures around an event. So slick. –Ed.] As far as I'm concerned, Posterous is the best for free hosting of personal websites. It's incredibly flexible, drop-dead simple to use (I mean, how hard is it to send an email?), it has links to and from the social networking world, offers great looking themes, supports your own private domain names, and never seems to have any downtime. However, for small business sites, which are one of the other main uses for iWeb and MobileMe hosting, it's really not appropriate. Squarespace Businesses looking for a way to make beautiful sites with associated hosting should take a peek at Squarespace. This is a combination of a typographically-friendly web-based design tool and hosting that produces some great-looking sites. As with MobileMe hosting, you can have Squarespace host your own domain, and the hosting prices are relatively low -- $144 to $432 per year depending on how popular your site is, how many editors you want, and how many big business features you need. As with WordPress, Squarespace is easily integrated with shopping cart services. And when you see small business sites like this or this, you can see how professional and compelling Squarespace websites can be. Drupal / Drupal Gardens WordPress probably powers more websites and blogs than any other content management system, but Drupal is another hugely popular tool. It's an open source system like WordPress, meaning that the software is written and supported by a community, and the base files are free for the copying. Drupal powers the websites for The Economist, Examiner.com, and even the White House, so you can see that it's a professional system. For those who are making the move from iWeb and MobileMe hosting, Drupal Gardens might be a good place to start. It's a hosted system similar to WordPress.com and offers a lot of the power of Drupal 7. It's free for low-bandwidth use, with paid subscriptions for more users, more traffic, and support. Drupal sites can be extremely idiosyncratic in style, and the content management system has built-in features like forums, polls, galleries, and more. The free account is a great way to get your feet wet in the ocean of Drupal, and you can then either move to a paid subscription or put a Drupal installation on another host and move your content. RapidWeaver I've talked a lot about web-based blogging tools here, but what about easy Mac-based website tools? RapidWeaver ($59.99) from Realmac Software is a favorite of a lot of Mac users. In many ways, RapidWeaver is similar to iWeb. You create a site using a template, add pages, drop in addons (like widgets in iWeb), and then publish your site. While you're working on your content, you can toggle between an editing mode and a view of the site as it will look when it's published -- that's helpful for making sure that there are no surprises when the publish button is pushed. If you use RapidWeaver, you'll need to have a web hosting provider. The app supports FTP publishing, so just about any web hosting provider will be able to accommodate your site. Realmac has a store for RapidWeaver themes, plug-ins, and another feature called Stacks. Themes define the look and feel of the site, plug-ins provide extended capabilities like forms or ecommerce, and stacks are another way of including features that are not built into the basic app. There's a free trial available from RealMac before you buy RapidWeaver from the Mac App Store or direct from the company. Sandvox Another venerable web creation app for Mac is Sandvox 2 ($77) from Karelia Software. For a website creation and publishing experience that is close to that of iWeb, but with a lot more features and flexibility, Sandvox is probably the way to go. Even the user interface for Sandvox looks a lot like iWeb. As with both iWeb and RapidWeaver, there are a variety of themes included, many of which come in more than one choice of color. Unlike with iWeb, you can edit the raw HTML of your website and even run it through the W3C Markup Validation Service from within the app. Sandvox includes a long list of objects (essentially the same as iWeb widgets or RapidWeaver plug-ins). Things like Amazon lists (for use with an Amazon Associates account), a built-in Facebook "Like" button, Flickr thumbnails, or a built-in Twitter feed are easy to drag right into a Sandvox page. Once again, you'll need to get web hosting from any of the many providers out there. Sandvox supports publishing not only through FTP and SFTP, but WebDAV as well. You can download the app for a free trial and see if Sandvox is for you. Conclusion These are just ten of the possible web creation and hosting solutions that iWeb users have available to them. If you're currently hosting an iWeb site on MobileMe, it's a perfect time to start thinking about what you'll do in the post-MobileMe world. Whether you choose to continue using iWeb for a while and just host your site elsewhere, or decide to go with another tool or a web-based content management system, there's no better time to begin planning your website redesign or move. Keep in mind, though, before you tear up every bit of your carefully crafted iWeb workflow: it is still June of 2011, and there will be a full year before the MobileMe servers go dark in June of 2012. It's likely that we'll be hearing something more from Apple with regard to iWeb site migration around the time of the iCloud launch later this year. After all, as Fortune points out, this isn't the first time that an Apple web publishing tool has been kicked to the curb -- .Mac HomePage got the boot in July of 2009. I did not include professional-level tools like Adobe Dreamweaver in this list, since we wanted to show tools that anyone who is well-versed in the use of iWeb could easily use. If you favor other easy-to-use web creation and publishing tools, let us know in the comments.
RapidWeaver giving users trouble, fix has been submitted
Fans of Realmac Software purchased RapidWeaver from the Mac App Store today, only to have trouble with the app. Fortunately, Realmac is aware of the issue and a fix is on the way. Users took to Twitter to lodge their complaints. One customer wrote, "just bought [RapidWeaver 5] on the app store and I can't edit my RW4 project. The add page dialog is empty and I get missing plugin errors." We spoke with Nik Fletcher, head of support and QA at Realmac, who assured us that it will be taken care of soon. "The fix is already in with Apple for approval," he said, "and it should be live later today via the [Mac App Store] update mechanism." Indeed, the app's official Twitter stream, which Nik calls "the best thing for people to keep an eye on," confirms this as well. Sit tight, Rapidweaver users! You'll be back in business in no time.
Realmac talks about the future of the Mac App Store and reduces pricing
In anticipation of tomorrow's opening of the Mac App Store, Realmac Software announced pricing for its line of Macintosh software that will appear in the store. In a blog post yesterday, Realmac wrote that it believes the Mac App Store will usher in more focused apps that will do one thing and one thing well. The days of "Swiss Army Knife" programs may be winding down. Realmac also believes upgrade pricing is a thing of the past with software vendors taking a cue from Apple; the company sells its iLife and iWork suites for a set price and provides minor upgrades until a new full version is released, when the consumer is then charged the full price for the new version. Lastly, Realmac believes that prices of apps in the Mac App Store will get cheaper since the iOS App Store created an auction market that drove down prices. Where prices will end up is anyone's guess. In light of this, Realmac made some pretty big changes. RapidWeaver, the website creation tool, is dropping in price both on the Mac App Store and on the Realmac site, from US$79 down to $39.99 for a limited time. It seems like Realmac is taking a flyer on this, since they are interested in seeing how prices shake out, and intend to adjust the price accordingly as time goes by.
TUAW TV Live: AirPrint, AirPlay, RapidWeaver, and more
It's nearly 5 PM ET, which means it's time for TUAW TV Live. This is the weekly livestreaming video show where me and a group of Apple geeks get together to chat about the latest news from Cupertino and beyond. Today's show is all about what iOS 4.2 brought to the picture. I'll do some live demos of some of the features in action, and will have recorded video for other features that need an Apple TV to show off. I'll also be demoing RapidWeaver 5.0, which was released today. You can even enter to win a free license for RapidWeaver, valued at US$79. How can you join in on the fun? From your Mac or PC, go to the next page by clicking the read more link at the bottom of this post, and you'll find a livestream viewer and a chat tool. The chat tool allows you to participate by asking questions or making comments. If you're driving somewhere and would like to watch TUAW TV Live while you're stuck in traffic, please don't -- keep your eyes on the road! However, if someone else is doing the driving, you can watch the show on your iPhone by downloading the free Ustream Viewing Application. We haven't neglected our iPad users, since you can tune in to TUAW TV Live on your iPad! That link will send you to a non-Flash page, although you won't have access to our chat tool. And one final note -- if the show has started and you're seeing a previously recorded show instead of the livestream, you can always pop on over to ustream.tv/tuaw to join the show in progress.
TUAW TV Live: The post-iOS 4.2 show
A few weeks ago, in anticipation of iOS 4.2 making its way to our iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads, I hosted an hour-long episode of TUAW TV Live in which we journeyed together through some of the upcoming features of the OS upgrade. On today's show, we'll see how well some of the new features work in reality. I'll show you how AirPrint works from iPad and iPhone using Ecamm's Printopia software on the Mac, play with AirPlay, and discuss the pros and cons of iOS 4.2. With RapidWeaver 5.0 now available and a giveaway of ten licenses for the popular web design tool going on right now here on TUAW, I'll also be demonstrating the new version of the application and highlighting some of the features of RapidWeaver 5.0. With Apple seemingly ignoring iWeb during the release of iLife '11, RapidWeaver is looking like a contender for the title of best easy-to-use web design tool. Join us at 5 PM ET today here at TUAW. Just drop by a few minutes before the start of the show for instructions on how to view the livestream and participate in the chat. Remember that all TUAW TV Live shows are archived for your viewing pleasure on Ustream.
RapidWeaver 5.0: TUAW exclusive first look and promo code giveaway
RapidWeaver, the easy-to-use and incredibly powerful website creation tool from Realmac Software, has just been updated to version 5.0. I had a sneak peek at the Mac OS X app earlier this week, and I'd like to share the experience with you. From what I've seen in a few days of working with the application, a lot of RapidWeaver has undergone a complete rewrite. For example, the resource system that manages website resources like PDFs, images and ZIP archives was previously available only for individual pages. Now, they're available in a sidebar alongside of pages for easy access. It's a simple drag and drop operation to add resources, whether they're images, movies or sound files. There's a QuickLook button for seeing those resources close up as well. RapidWeaver 5 has new sitemap plug-ins that generate HTML sitemaps for projects, as well as an XML sitemap that details every page in a project. The XML sitemap is submitted to the appropriate search engines when a site is published. Realmac has added six new themes to the built-in theme library, bringing the total number of included themes up to 47. Of course, there are many more themes available from third-party developers. Realmac has also consolidated themes that are applied to a RapidWeaver project, and those themes can optionally be compressed for faster loading of sites.
After iLife '11: Alternatives to iDVD and iWeb
Over the weekend TUAW is going to be featuring in-depth reviews of the new iLife '11 suite -- or at least the three apps that were updated. As most of you know by now, iWeb and iDVD didn't receive an update at all. In light of that, we've compiled a list of several alternatives to iDVD and iWeb that you may want to try out. From a purely consumer standpoint, I don't think any of these apps offer the ease of use that Apple has so successfully built into iWeb and iDVD, but given that iDVD seems all but abandoned -- as should the MacBook optical drive be -- and the future is uncertain for iWeb, it's always nice to know you have some alternatives. iDVD alternatives: SmallDVD SmallDVD is a simple utility that lets you take any video files and add them to a DVD image ISO which can then be burned onto a DVD using Disc Utility. SmallDVD doesn't have many features, but it will appeal to those of you who want to create very simple DVDs with static background menus. It also has the added benefit of only creating the ISO file which can then be shared to DropBox or iDisk, and then downloaded and viewed on another computer using only the ISO -- no optical drive needed. SmallDVD is a free download.
RapidWeaver 4.2.2 adds JS-Kit and improved Safari 4 support
Realmac Software has just released version 4.2.2 of TUAW favorite RapidWeaver. Although it may appear to be a minor point release, there are actually quite a few bug fixes and backend additions in this update. Highlights from the release notes: Completely re-written contact form with support for multiple attachments, better security and spam protection and better support for Windows servers. JS-Kit commenting for blogs. If you were using the previously built-in Haloscan comments, everything works just fine, whether you migrate your account to JS-Kit or not. Improved Safari 4 support Better RSS handling As a user who was using the 4.2.2 betas just for Safari 4 support, this update means the end of lots of headaches. Use the auto-update function within RapidWeaver or head to Realmac's site to download the latest version. RapidWeaver 4 requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and is $79 US.
Stacks plugin brings fluid layouts to RapidWeaver
If we've said it once, we've said it 1000 times: TUAW loves RapidWeaver. One of RapidWeaver's strengths is that it has an easy-to-use interface, but you can do some really, really powerful stuff with the program. Plus, the third-party network of plugins and themes is really, really top notch. YourHead Software, which makes some of my favorite RapidWeaver add-ons, has just released a new plugin called Stacks, which ups the ante on what you can do with RapidWeaver, without even having to mess with any code. Think of Stacks as a souped-up version of one of YourHead's other plugins, Blocks. Mat reviewed Blocks a couple of years ago and it remains one of the best RapidWeaver plugins around. Stacks takes the WYSIWYG drag-and-drop layout approach of Blocks, but adds support for fluid layouts (even if your theme has a variable width), nested objects, stacks within stacks, and more. I've been using the Stacks beta for the last couple of weeks and I have to say that it has opened my eyes to some possibilities with RapidWeaver that I hadn't even considered before. Traditionally, creating a different layout for each page is time consuming unless you rely on snippets or go with basic designs. Because I like to use RapidWeaver to rapidly prototype sites, being able to build out various layouts extremely quickly saves me time. As a demonstration, I created this page in about five minutes using Stacks, some graphics and Elixir's Twitter plugin for Stacks. That's another feature I like about Stacks -- there's an API -- so not only can advantageous users look at building their own elements for use in Stacks, RapidWeaver plugin and theme developers can look at using it too. Stacks can also use Loghound's excellent PlusKit so that you can embed Google Docs, other page types or elements and do lightboxing with your photos, all within Stacks. Stacks is $19.95 and it requires RapidWeaver 4.2.1 or newer to work. You can try the demo (direct link to DMG) for free and access all the features; you're just limited to a certain number of items on each page.
Elixir offers new RapidWeaver theme and special bundle
Here at TUAW, RapidWeaver is our longstanding-favorite WYSIWYG web site creation tool. I personally like to to use RapidWeaver for rapid prototyping or for creating sites that don't need a CMS backend. One of the best parts of RapidWeaver is its extensive library of beautiful themes. Elixir makes some of the best looking RapidWeaver themes around and have just introduced a new design to the fold: Aqua.The new theme is $12.95 US, but for the next three days, Elixir is bundling all of its themes together, including the new Aqua thme, for $54.95 US. Elixir has shied away from bundling themes together in the past so this is a great opportunity to get twenty great looking RapidWeaver themes (compatible with both 3.6 and 4.x) for a really reasonable price.I like Elixir's themes because they are not only attractive, but they come with extras and multiple customization options. Couple that with RapdiWeaver's built-in theme-editing abilities and you can create something really slick without exerting a lot of effort.If you purchase the Elixir Extreme Bundle, youll also get a 50% off coupon for use at Elixir's sister site the Icon Lab. The bundle will only be available for the next three days, so if you're looking to put a little more color in your (Rapid)weave, better get a move on.
RapidWeaver 4.2 update kills bugs
Realmac Software has updated their easy Web site creation tool RapidWeaver to version 4.2 (not 2.2! Sorry). The new version is primarily a bug fix, but also adds a couple of new features.The bugs that were squashed include: An issue when undoing set/remove links Blog plugin confused image file names in body and summary fields Growl notifications no longer occur when RapidWeaver is in the foreground The application no longer hangs on quit No more "System Exception 11" when duplicating themes Now able to add 3GP and M4V files to Movie Albums The new features include the ability to hold down either the Command or Option key while starting RapidWeaver to disable all third-party add-ons until the app is restarted, and the ability to add and remove links from the sidebar is available again.This is a free update for existing RapidWeaver owners.
Rapidweaver 4.1 released
RapidWeaver is our "favourite" WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) web design tool that gives you more flexibility than what iWeb. Realmac Software, the developer of RapidWeaver, has updated the software to version 4.1, and included some new features that are worth a look, including: QuickLook support is now standard .Mac references have been changed to show "MobileMe" Images pasted into a Styled Text area keep their names as specified in Finder Page inspector updates when/if a page changes PPC support for iMedia Browser Owners of RapidWeaver 4.0 and 3.6 are eligible for a free update to version 4.1. You can see all of the updates on the RapidWeaver Version History page. RapidWeaver 4 is available from the Realmac website for $79 (US). There is a free demo available as well. [via Ars Technica]
RWThemeMiner 2.0.5
Did you just upgrade to the latest version of Realmac Software's RapidWeaver? Then you might notice RWThemeMiner, which lets you edit your RW themes, is no longer working. Fret not because RWThemeMiner was just updated to version 2.0.5 which works with RapidWeaver 4.RWThemeMiner is available for $15 (US) and you can download a free 20 day trial version from the developer's website.
TUAW Review: RapidWeaver 4
Realmac Software has recently released the fourth major version of their RapidWeaver website creation software. RapidWeaver definitely gives a whole new meaning to "drag and drop," as you can create whole websites by dragging and dropping files onto RapidWeaver. As soon as the Realmac website was updated I downloaded the software so I could get a hands on review of version 4. We took a look at three different categories: features, user interface and usability. %Gallery-23976%More after the break.
RapidWeaver 4 ships
Realmac has released RapidWeaver 4, the latest version of their popular template-based web site design software. As former TUAWer Nik mentioned on our last talkcast, the new version represents a substantial upgrade. In addition to an overhauled interface the release incorporates Leopard-only features like Core Animation and Quick Look for its new XML file format. There are also iPhone specific features like the creation of the WebClip icons for the iPhone's home screen. RapidWeaver 4 is regularly $79, but is available for a limited time at $59. For registered users of version 3.6 the upgrade is free; it is $30 to upgrade from 3.5 and earlier.
More YourHead plugin goodness for RapidWeaver
I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of the web development application RapidWeaver, but I don't consider it complete until supplemented by a variety of excellent plugins from YourHead software. We've covered their excellent WYSIWYG plugin Blocks before and now they have a couple of new plugins that add some neat features. First up is PayLoom (jointly developed with YabDab) which makes it easy to set up a webstore on the internet using PayPal's Shopping Cart service. Second is a new beta plugin called Kwix that makes it easy to create fluid animated menus on RapidWeaver pages, and best of all it's compatible with the newest Blocks beta as well. With the MacUpdate Bundle we've been posting about being extended, now is a great time to get into RapidWeaver development.PayLoom is $19.95 and a demo is available. Kwix is still in beta but is available for download from YourHead.
Give Good Food to Your Mac promo discounts Euro-indie apps
Not quite done with that holiday shopping? A little birdie tipped us to the upcoming "Give Good Food to your Mac" promotion, officially opening tomorrow -- if you're already a customer of one of the participants, you might get a preview link in the mail today. A ragtag band of European developers has put together this bundle discount: buy any 3 applications from the list, get 30% off your total, and scaling up from there (5 apps = 40%, 7 apps = 50%, 10 apps = 70% discount). Could add up to substantial savings, especially if you're paying in weak greenbacks like us Yanks must.The list of available programs (full rundown in the bottom of the post) includes such heavy hitters as web authoring app RapidWeaver, bitmap diva Pixelmator and project management tool Merlin, among lighter fare such as iStopMotion, CoverScout and Expert Wine Cellar. While you're waiting for the annual MacSanta discounts to fire up, go ahead and check out GGFTYM.
