Probably for most of you this will not make the biggest difference in the world. Blocks now supports OS X Panther 10.3.9.

Actually I finished the fix for this a few days ago and was hoping to put a few more things in for the release, but my real life intervened a made that practically impossible. But I feel bad hold back a good solid bug fix any longer. So here it is.

Remember this is a beta. There are still some bugs out there, be careful.

If you buy a copy of Blocks before version 1.0 is released and enter the coupon code "BLOCKSBETA" then you'll get 25% off Blocks. Just a reminder for those who didn't catch that deal a few days ago.

No not those kind of chips. I mean the kind that are in all of your favorite stuff. Some people say, "computer chips" even when they're not in computers. Other people call them ASICs or maybe microchips. Sometimes the things we like to call chips -- those little black square things -- might actually house a few.
Personally I like to say, "I design micro-electronics," when people ask. It's a little more generic, and I think fitting, for what I actually do.

I don't often blog here about my real life. In fact I've probably only vaguely mentioned my real job before. But this week is special. If you or someone you know designs chips or micro-electronics or whatever... then you'll know what I'm talking about. This week in my real job I finished a tapeout. For the uninitiated that means that the chip was completed and sent to the fabrication plant to be built.

Building chips is not a cheap endeavor. A "cheap" chip, like the one I'm working on, will have a fabrication cost of $200K to about $700K depending on how fast we want it back. That means that before it leaves the design-house there's a lot of work that goes in to making sure that it's not broken. 15-hour work days, "all-nighters," and the kind of stress that makes you visit a doctor are par for the course. I've been doing this for well over 10 years now and it does not appear to get any easier the longer you do it or the more managerial your position. It's this reason that writing software after work is what I do for a relaxing hobby.

But when you finish a chip it's a lot like finishing the SAT (A-Levels for the Brits). You know that you've done your best, you're grateful that it's over, and you really hope that you didn't fuck it up.

Although the chip won't make it to fab for a few more days and there are many more regressions to run my part is largely over. That means that my evenings will once again be free to work on YourHead software and also that I got almost nothing done last week.

That was a very long justification for that fact that today's update will be rather slim.

10.3.9 compatibility is still missing in action. I have yet to get a 10.3 system up and running. My spare powerbook has a dead power cord and it's old enough that the standard G4 PowerBook plug doesn't fit. I have to go to San Jose in the next few days anyway, so I'll stop by Fry's and pick one up -- then we should be in business.

But I'm sure a few of you will run it anyway, just because it's fun to watch stuff crash. :-)

If you are one of these sorts, would you mind opening your Console and telling me what spit out right before things went wrong? You can post it or email it, whatever works for you.

Today's beta contains fixes and additions to the Page tab of the Blocks Info window. As has been said here before and mentioned on the RapidWeaver forums a few dozen times, Blocks does not know much about the Theme that your page is currently using. So it has a hard time building a WYSIWYG GUI for Edit mode.

After long brainstorming sessions with a wide range of folks, I've come up with a two pronged approach at relieving some of the interface pain:

1) Newbies
We have to think about the new users first. Their newly created Blocks page with the default settings should definitely not seem broken. Limited, perhaps, but as functional as possible. With that in mind, when you create a new Blocks page the default content size is fixed (not fluid) and quite small. This reduces the likelihood that theme-overlap will occur -- and if it does it should be minimal as opposed to chaotic. And hopefully the small size will encourage the question, "Where is the setting to make this bigger?"

2) Power Users
Power users who want more from Blocks will hopefully find the Page tab in the Blocks Info window and experiment. The Page tab has plenty of rope to hang yourself and provides shoes painted like targets for anyone who's already got a gun. You can overlap content right into your sidebar, produce layouts that IE will hate and all sorts of other things that RapidWeaver generally prevents you from doing. Hopefully, though, I've made it easy enough to experiment that people will be able to quickly recover from the truly bad mistakes. I know I will get a certain amount of email about an attempt to fit 800pixels into a 450pixel box, but that happens for Columns at least once a week -- despite the fact that Columns was designed to be the Kevlar Shoe armor for those who can't tell their own feet from a 78-year-old Texan lawyer.

Ready, download, PULL!, aim, fire!

I've also fixed a bunch of other internal stuff that you probably don't care about and turned on the registration button because way more people bought Blocks than I ever would have thought -- so I had better give them a place to put their reg codes.

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PB 6 Change List
------------------------------------------------------------
- added interface element to allow fluid width
- added fluid width to published output
- overflow button and output
- fixed drag and drop location bug that was created when centering the content view
- re-enabled the reg button
- sets dirty bit of the page more conservatively
- missing default setttings are set
------------------------------------------------------------

I hate to sound trite and say something like, "Buy Now!" "Supplies are limited!" "Operators are standing by!"

On the other hand I do want to reward some of the hard working folks who have been helping me through the Blocks Public Beta development. With 5 public betas tested and a few more to come, a reward is deserved.

My webstore will now be happy to sell you a copy of Blocks for $16.95, but have I got a deal for you.

If you buy a copy before version 1.0 is released and enter the coupon code "BLOCKSBETA" then you'll get 25% off Blocks. That's about $4.24 or a total cost of just over twelve bucks!


So act now and save, it slices -- it dices, it's not available in stores, and can cut your hair with a vacuum cleaner.

*some restrictions apply, not available in all states, and cutting your hair with a vacuum cleaner is a really bad idea.

I think this release might seem pretty meager to the outside observer. I mean, there's only a few things on the change list, right?

You'd be right, of course. There aren't many changes that are noticeable. But that belies the extent of this update. It really has been a big three days since Beta 4. In fact some of the features have been in development for quite a while more than just three days.

Let's take, for example, the change to the background. It's really a very extensive change not only to the visual style and drop-shadows, but to the whole view hierarchy. I think the results look very nice, don't you?

And then there is the registration button. I know spending your hard earned cash is a subject that you might not want to think about, but don't worry, I have good news in the works. I'm arranging to have a price break for all of you who've been helping me do the public beta testing. And of course for owners of the other plugins too. But all those coupon codes and package deals are even harder than programming plugins. So while I slog through the online store I'm going to keep quite on what the deals will be. But make sure and check back often, bookmark the RSS feed, or whatever you've got to do, because those deals won't be available forever, and I'm only going to post 'em here.

Today's bug fixes are somewhere between cosmetic and functional. Maybe half of each. The primary fix is an overhaul of the selection ring. It still looks pretty crappy for images -- we'll work on that. But for other blocks it's looking much better.
The first thing that you'll probably notice is that if you select something that is partially obscured, the selection ring and resize handles float above the other objects. It also means that you can move, resize, or whatever you want a partially obscured block.
I made some changes to the appearance of the ring too. It's a bit more translucent rather than full on, and has a sort of shadow effect too -- just one pixel -- very subtle. I think the overall appearance is really a lot better.
I've also updated the code a bit, I haven't checked validation (shame on me) but I think it should be closer if it's not all the way there.

Come and get the download.

Next up is a bit of an overhaul on the content background. I can do better.

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PB 4 Change List
------------------------------------------------------------
- selection ring color adjusted for transparency
- removed the id tag from the divs -- again
- the selection rings now appear above unselected objects
- selected object controls can now be manipulated even if they're obscured
------------------------------------------------------------

There's a new Columns release, get over to the Download page and grab it.

Over the past couple weeks I've had a few bug reports about Columns. All of the reports involved the same bit of code: The color backgrounds and borders. Really it's not such a hard task, but Mac OS X is not programmer friendly when it comes to color. What I would really like is to always use since I'm dealing with the Web is RGB colors. What I get is calibrated color spaces, conversions, gamuts, and lots of other things that I only partially understand. Sometimes I'd just like to do a:
[aColor convertToColorSpaceNamed:@"dummySpace"];

If anyone knows a good programmers tutorial that you don't need an aesthetics degree to understand I'd love to hear about it.

However, I've muddled through and fixed (at least) 3 bugs involving color picking. I also added some text hints at the percentages in the Structure setup. And a reset button to get you back to the good old 50% point. Hopefully this will satisfy both the GUI people who like to slide things around and the Monk-ish people that need to know that it's EXACTLY 50%. I bet you already know which one you are.

I didn't update the actual download last night. Sorry about that. Should work fine now. The link is on the Download page.

Here's Public Beta 3. Just four fixes. A couple of them are probably more important than the others. Give it a download and let me know what you think.

I've been hearing anecdotes that extensive use can lead to a RW crash. Unfortunately most of these bug reports look like this, "wow it crashed after I used it for 45 minutes -- I'm going to keep secret what I might have been doing at the time -- ha ha ha!!!" OK, they're not that bad. I know that people are not intentionally holding back information, but sometimes it feels that way. Obviously, I'm not very much closer to fixing that bug, or even knowing if I've fixed it.

I did discover a way to duplicate one hard crash. I haven't yet fixed it, but at least I can see it happen in slow-motion and look at the stack trace. And while we're waiting for a fix for that one -- don't try to duplicate your Blocks page -- it's not pretty.

------------------------------------------------------------
PB 3 Change List
------------------------------------------------------------
- there is now a single info window instead of one for each page
- dragging in an empty area no longer affects next drag -- that was weird
- the other delete key should now perform a delete too
- another try at eliminating z-indexs
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No not that question. I'm already married. I mean, "How much should I charge for Blocks?"

I actually have a pretty good idea what I'm going to charge. I've done my research (it involved statistical Magic 8-ball trails), I've asked the people I think should know (my 3-year old), and all of YourHead Software is in agreement (because there's just me).

But what do YOU think? How much?

Here are some other data to help confuse you:

Apps:
RapidWeaver is $34.95
Freeway Express is $99
Contribute is $149
iWeb is bundled for $79 + $99 for .Mac

Plugins:
Collage is $9.95
Columns is $7.95
RapidFlickr $9.95
Lockdown $7.95

And here are my thoughts to make you really puzzle:
Of course Blocks is a lot more complex than Collage so I feel like I should charge a bit more.
Obviously not as much as RapidWeaver, or even double the price of Collage. Somewhere in between.

Let me know what your 8-ball is saying.

Things are quite a bit quieter than I expected. Columns, for how simple a plugin it is, had a much more boisterous bunch of people hounding me for bug fixes. Perhaps it's that I've got a ways to go with Blocks that people aren't so up in arms about the bugs. Maybe they're too busy playing with it to talk about it. Maybe they've all gone to use iWeb.

Since YourHead software is really just little old me, and I tend to make somewhat slow progress, I thought I'd just start shipping as many bug fixes as I can. It gives everyone the opportunity of using the buggy software TODAY, and offers a little hope that something better might come very soon.

I won't usually release daily builds, but tonight I'll make an exception. I've fixed a couple of nasty bugs and added a couple important features and I thought people might be interested.

Since these releases are coming rapid-fire, I'm not going to post them to another website, so if you want to catch 'em all you should probably bookmark our RSS feed. I'll post the change list just like this one:

------------------------------------------------------------
PB Build 2 Change List
------------------------------------------------------------
- page width now reads correctly from from saved files
- added background and stroke settings to the interface and output -- missing in preview
- potential fix for z-index
- shift key no longer causes selection toggle if clicking on the resize handles
- removed some Console clutter
------------------------------------------------------------

I'm posting my first public beta of Blocks tonight. I'm really quite anxious to hear the response from everyone. This plugin is a lot more complex than the prior attempts. That complexity comes with a lot of bugs. On one hand I'm nervous about putting something with so many warts out on the net, but I just can't afford to hoard it any longer. I really need the wider opinion to help me find great solutions to some of the problems. OK, I'll shut up now... come and get it!

It's getting close now. There are just a few more bugs to get through. Then the public beta can start.

Stay on target. Stay on target...

I'm excited to say that I've just had my fourth release to my private beta testers. Things are really starting to take shape. The bugs aren't quite so debilitating, crashing, or embarrassing.
Depending on how the next few days go I'll either be releasing a public beta or at least expanding my beta pool to a few more folks.