Today was an odd internet day. I had less traffic on my website today than on any day since Christmas. Is this some sort of interesting holiday in other countries that I'm unaware of? What gives? Where did everyone go? Maybe there was just some really good weather and everyone decided to for a hike.

This weekend I spent some time trying to clean up the interface a little. For the most part, developing a new app (or plugin) is a left brained experience. All logical thought and problem solving. But to make a really clean Mac piece of software it's good to have someone around that "gets" Photoshop. Unfortunately for YourHead software there's only me.
When it comes to Photoshop, I'm no newbie, but I'm also sadly lacking the chops of a pro. What that means is that I can generally turn out some half-way descent looking GUI, but it takes me four times as long as it really should.
So this weekend I spent four times as much time working on interface elements. Tweaking positions, redrawing icons, and dropping shadows. In particular I spent time primping my Info window, it's icons, and it's organization. What do you think?

I know it's only been about 24 hours since I asked for beta testers, but already I have enough people to make a nice little group. I may grow the group a bit later, so don't give up hope.

Oh, and here's my new button icons for "Add Link" and "Remove Link" what do you think?

OK, so the icon wasn't exactly a good hint. I think this next one will give you a better idea of where Blocks is heading. If that doesn't get people to stop talking about Notes for a little while, I don't know what will!
By the way I'm looking for a couple more people willing to submit to the pain that is beta testing. There's not much glory in it. More than likely you'll see lots of crashes. And you definitely won't be able to use this stuff on your main site. Well, you could, but you'd most likely suffer corrupted files, lost data, and lots of other fun stuff.
The reward? Nothing less than fame and the adoration of all of your peers. Or something like that.

There hasn't been much news for a while. I've been pretty much absent from the blog since MacWorld. Don't worry, I haven't given up and started using iWeb or something crazy like that. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. I've been staying up late coding as fast as I can type!

As is usual for a MacWorld, I've been inspired to do something bigger. This year I was inspired by RapidWeaver and encouraged to find that iWeb is probably not going to change the RapidWeaver market too much.

I'm working on a new plugin, something quite a bit different than the others. I've just sent out my first distribution to a few (un)lucky folks for comment. I'm not going to let out too much though, because it's still changing so fast. But will let you see the new icon. What do you think?

Over the course of the next few days I'll be at MacWorld SF. That said, it probably won't be too much different than my regular day job at diverting my attention from plugin support.

But if you are in SF then stop by at the RapidWeaver gatherings and hunt me down. I'll be wearing my cool, but very faded Panic T-Shirt, wearing my backpack, and toting a big camera to take pictures of all the most geeky things I find. ;-)

Maybe it's because the big Stevenote is tomorrow or maybe it's because I've actually corrected some of my bugs, but the fixes seem to have "stuck" this time. Since the "fix" for the effects were to remove them, it's hardly surprising, but nonetheless, I'm glad.

Without further ado, I'm going to dub beta version 4 as the final release. I'm mostly pressured because there are several bug fixes that I think I really need to get out to the masses and I wanted to make sure that everyone saw them and had a chance to download.

Check out the download page and grab a copy.

Well, it looks like the onload event handler had some more interesting effects than I could have possibly predicted. However, at least these might be fixable. Check out my post over on the forum.

It looks like there's a bug somewhere (and I don't THINK it's in my code) that prevents the DOCTYPE header from being written to the file. All I have to do is put an "onload" anywhere in a valid spot in the content and the DOCTYPE disappears. At least so long as the output style is not set to Default -- in which case things are hunky-dory.

Anyway, I'm going to do a release without the effects, #1 because I like the border feature and #2 because it fixes a fairly nasty bug involving links.

I'll be talking with everyone I can to show them the DOCTYPE bug. Hopefully we'll get to the bottom of it and we'll have some cool effects.

This bug was really ugly. I've removed the offending zoom feature, in favor of a brand new onload zoom feature. As usual I'm trying to eat my own dogfood and I'm using the feature on my homepage. Check it out. Yes, I'll add more option -- later.

I've written a ton on the whys and wherefores of this ugly bug over on the rapidweaver forum, so I'm not going to write it all again. The short version of the story is this: The zoom just can't be done well in Safari, and if it can't be "great" then I'd rather not do it at all. So I'm stepping back a few yards (stayed up very late for a few days) and I'm punting on that feature (removing it in favor of something that I think you might like).

Go get the download and let me know what you think.

I'm releasing Collage 1.4 in beta today. It's over in on the Download page. Even though I think I'm getting a little better at testing this stuff, this is still the first public beta and you might want to keep it well away from your primary work area.
I'm holding off introducing too many new features until RapidWeaver 3.5 is released, but I did manage to sneak in a few things that I thought would be safe from any API changes:

• The Zoom Effect.
  • It should now do history correctly in Safari the history works now, but I've just realized that the zoom only works once -- ahhh!
  • Degrades to a standard link in IE Mac
• A one pixel outline on the outside of the border. See my home page for an example.
  • color selectable
  • enablable
  • roundable
• More detail given in the progress sheet during export.
• Bug where the link didn't update after it was changed from an internal link to an external link fixed.
• Other stuff having to do with interface bindings that's behind the scenes.

Nope, no header text. That feature is definitely waiting for version 3.5. Supporting styled text currently requires that I conform to a protocol that I Collage doesn't currently conform to. My guess is that this protocol could easily change in RapidWeaver 3.5, we'll all have to be patient and see what the RealMacSoftware guys show us next week.