Hello All,

As I prepare for RW 3.5 I've been relatively happy with the effort required. For the most part once you get the hang of the changes they just tend to 'work'.

Tonight I spent a bit of time rethinking icons. My old icons were OK but I was never really happy with them (except for Lockdown which suited me just fine). in a ichat session with nik today he made two terrific suggestions for new icons (Compass for Sitemap and the little rotating balls for RapidFlickr). For Rapidflickr Nik even went ahead and designed it for me!




I think they all look pretty good given the constraints of 16x16... What do you think?

I've just built up a new version of MediaMonkey

Not too much changed except it now has a 'u' at the end. This version should work a bit better in more recent versions of RapidWeaver

MediaMonkey 0.3u

Worked some on improving my build system so now all of my DMG's should properly show background images.


Also cleaned up Rapidflickr, it now renders the same way in both 3.2 and 3.5. There is a new option called "Fit Pictures" in the output section. This isn't 100% functional yet.

Rapidflickr 1.03u

Ok,

I'm pushing out a few new version. These still need work (specifically Rapidflickr) before I put out a release suitable for a broad announcement but for a few brave early adopters they can 'go to town'

Changes from the last release:

1) Sitemap & Lockdown were PPC only
2) Rapidflickr was broken horribly in 3.5. I've done a quick fix but it's ugly. Expect something nicer soon but at least for now it will render out cleaner.


Rapidflickr 1.02u
Sitemap 0.91u
Lockdown 1.53u

Hi All,

I've put a few new builds of plugins on my server.

You can get them

Lockdown 1.52u
RapidFlickr 1.01u
SiteMap 0.9u


You should be able to guess what the 'u' is, They should work in Rapid weaver 3.2 and 'future releases' so go ahead and grab them now if you like.

-John

I Just put a new plugin on my server.

It's really a toy and honestly most of you should avoid it like the plague.

I call it Media Monkey and it simply adds a imedia browser to any styled text in RapidWeaver -- This is the same iLife browser that SandVox uses.


It's not really tested that well and it may well crash RapidWeaver so if you really want to play with it (again, you are kind of crazy if you do) I'd first use it on some 'toy' sites before considering leaving it on your system.

To remove it delete the MediaMonkey plugin from your ~Library/Application Support/RapidWeaver directory


You have been warned.

You can get it Here

Well it's been quite a day -- I've been meaning to do some really well thought out, nice blogs since that hasn't been happening I thought I would throw out a few random thoughts.

First of all the fine folks at Apple released the Macbook. I must say I'm fairly impressed at the features & price point. Isaiah purchased a 17" MBP which he loves and while I'm totally jealous of it, I've really been looking for something small & portable. I'll run down to the Apple store tomorrow but if they have them in stock I might be coming home with one -- The only bummer is the graphics chipset is kind of cheesy (Intel 950) but I do love that small size!

Also the fine folks at Flickr updated their web interface. Really nice... It's always been the killer online photosite and know it's even better! Combined with RapidFlickr this is a great way to share photos.

I've also been working a bit on RapidBlog. It had become moribund but recently I've picked it up and made some steady progress... Still a ways to go and I'm not going to make any estimates at this point since I've been spectacular at missing them but it may see light of day some day.

Finally, I really need to talk briefly about Palm OS vs. Pocket PC. I recently purchased a Dell AXIM X51V which I mostly use for reading e-books. Great hardware but the software... well let's just say for all it's warts it makes Palm OS look really good (my cell phone is a Treo 650 which I love even though it's big)

Famous last words

"It certainly took longer than I thought"

That sort of describes my attempts at providing Lockdown in German. I've thought it would be fun (yes fun) to make a localized plugin.

"No problem" I thought "First I need to find someone who actually speaks German"

Enter Marc Widmer who is from Switzerland where everyone (apparently) speaks about 5 different languages.

"Ok, now how do I actually do this"

Enter ilocalize which is also from a couple of brothers who are, curiously, also from Switzerland and who have a company called "Arizona Software" which, in case you are wondering, is not at all close to Switzerland.

"Great... Let's see just type in the german words where the english words, hit save ... ok that should be it"


.... Hmmm.. still in english
... Hmmm

Read more docs from apple where they say things like "You don't have to do anything really... it's all automatic"

Hmmmm....

(Each Hmmm is several weeks passing)

So I finally sat down and got it working... It's not pretty folks. You see the fine folks at apple never actually considered (as far as I can tell) that an application may not be localize but a plugin may. Stubbornly once OSX decides you are a non localized app in English it never reconsiders.

Why do I share this interesting bit of trivia? Well it's a warning, I may at some point in the future drop German localization if it becomes too painful but in the meantime if you put "German" before "English" in your system preferences enjoy

Rumor has it (or at least had it) that Apple releases the new MacBook (non-pro) tuesday (which as I write is now today!)

Even though I keep on eyeing the 'pro' version the fact is my iMac works great in my day-to-day life, what I do need though is something for Intel testing as well as traveling. If the price is right and the feature set isn't too crippled the intel iBook MacBook may be just the ticket.

Oh, and i just put Sitemap 0.90 up on the server. It fixes Google & Yahoo sitemap export (previously if a page was hidden they didn't show up in the search index). You can read more and get it here