The nightly builds of the WebKit are now coming with a Javascript debugger called Drosera. I haven't played around with it very much, but it looks like an interesting development. There's more about it over on Ajaxian.

No not with the plugins -- because all of my plugins are IE compatible already. But my website theme now removes some of the PNG images and cool backgrounds so that IE users can feel more at home in a usable, albeit bland, website.

Collage 1.6 is here. Go get your download.

Although there were a lot of subtle interface tweaks and a few minor changes there were three big changes that you'll probably notice. Here's the list:

Medium Resolution
If you drag and drop large images into Collage, it no longer saves the images at their full resolution. It now cuts them down to a medium resolution. Still plenty of pixels for all the effects to work nicely, but it reduces your RW files to a much more manageable size. My test case of 6 high res jpegs from my Cannon Rebel brought my RapidWeaver file to it's knees -- 136MB. After this upgrade the RW file was reduced to less than 3MB. Wow! I took a screengrab because I didn't think you'd believe me.

Toolbar
Collage now has the "standard" toolbar that everyone knows and loves from Blocks and Accordion. It doesn't really add anything to the feature set, but I think it looks a whole lot nicer. And doesn't nicer looking software make you more productive? I like to think so.

Shareware Limits
For registered users this will not make one iota of a difference, but if you're new to Collage you'll probably like this. Now you can use all the settings, even the shadows, borders and outlines -- everything -- without registering, but you'll only be allowed to have 3 items. It just lines up better with the limits of Blocks, Accordion and even RapidWeaver itself. It lets people try out all the cool features, but still gives a significant reward to those who register.

Today we're releasing Accordion 1.0. For those who have been beta testing this should not be a huge change. But I have fixed all the bugs that have been reported and added some more finesse to a few interface elements. We have added a lot of documentation to our web site. And of course it's in Accordion format. We'll be adding more as we go.

Go get your download: Accordion 1.0 and Buy it Now


Unless you're new to our site, you'll probably also notice some pretty dramitic changes around here. We've rewritten our theme to be a bit less plain while keeping our generally stark and functional style. Pain = Good!

If you haven't already you should check out our homepage. It's totally made over with Blocks and I think it looks pretty nice.


Our new theme is quite IE 6.0 Window unfriendly. We used PNG everywhere and overlap elements in that way that IE really hates. If you are (forced) to use IE then don't let my theme fool you. ALL OUR PLUGINS ARE IE6.0 COMPATIBLE. Our website will be too, but we get very few Windows visitors -- so it has to come at a low priority. (It's kind of ironic for our Windows friends to be on the bottom end of the market-share curve, don't you think?)


For the curious, here's a few of the most significant bugs we fixed:
1) New content structure for side-tab accordions prevents cut-off when the content is shorter than the title list.
2) When Click-To-Close is enabled, the cursor displays a hand even over the selected title.
3) When deleting items from the accordion list the text area no longer becomes out of synch
4) When an item is dropped into the text area while the text area was not first-responder, the text area now saves the dropped content.
5) The text area is properly disabled when no items are selected.
6) Removed debugging statements for final release
7) Added documentation to the disk image.

Accordion Beta 8 is here and it comes heaping with cool new stuff. I think you'll really like it. If you haven't already you should go check out the Examples page to see some of the stuff that you can do. I'll post more examples too, so make sure to stop back by later this week.

Like the new features, then Digg It



Look at these cool new features:

Side Tabs
Now your accordion doesn't have to look so much like an accordion. It can just be a swooshy box with side tabs. The tabs are fully customizable, have a look at this example to see what I mean.
This is a big feature. It's almost like having two plugins in one. I can't wait to see what cool stuff people can do with this one. I think it's going to be a huge creative boost for RapidWeaver.

Selection Style
We had to modify moo.fx to make it work, but neither rain, nor sleet, nor the syntactic chaos of Javascript is going to keep me from bringing you cool stuff. Check out this example to see how the black title bar follows the selection. You can customize the color, border, and even add even swap the background image.

Alignment
Sometimes it's the simple things that bring you joy. Now you can align your accordion left, center or right.

And some important bug fixes:

Cursor
The cursor now looks like the normal I-Should-Click-On-That kind of cursor that you might expect. Of course the current selection turns off the little hand so that the people surfing your page will get the right sort of interactive feedback. This is the sort of detail that makes Web 2.0 a reality.

Internet Explorer 6
Surprise. There are more bugs that needed fixing for Internet Explorer. I know, I know, it's not a surprise at all. It's a wonder anything works with that piece of junk. But since the huge teaming masses that want to see your pictures, buy your stuff, and surf your pages are more than likely running that piece of junk, we had better make it work. So I've added a few little widgets. First I've corrected two CSS bugs and second I reduced the page width (Thanks BlueBall guys) to accommodate the dreaded IE Rounding bug.

Better Image Handling
Now when you select JPEG from the image output in the Page Inspector, you really get JPEG background images.

The snippet of Columns that checks registration codes has run into a little problem. It's stopped working. You see it does some math on some large numbers and I did a number conversion without using a double.

Needless to say, this means that I have to release a new version of Columns right away.

If you've just bought Columns or are considering it, then you MUST upgrade to version 1.3.2.

Go get your download.

This is just a tiny little release of Columns. There has been a little bit of code in there that was producing some invalid CSS. I had never fixed it before since all the browsers that I'm aware of behave well even with the invalid property. No harm, no foul.

But I've been updating a few things and I thought it would be a good idea to make it official.

Don't bother upgrading unless you're a CSS Valid Junky or you just like to see new cool stuff. But if you are a junky, go get your download.

Things are looking up. I rewrote a bit of code and it wasn't half as bad as I thought once I got going. I had just forgotten how to write Mac code when we didn't have bindings. Best of all I didn't have to do many backflips to make it compatible with the previous code. So even though this affects one of the primary data structures, you can just install the new version -- no worries.

Accordion should now, really, this time for sure, be compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.9. Also in this release is a fix for IE 6 compatibility -- although probably not the last. And I compressed the interface just a tad so that the controls close to the bottom of the interface are accessible on shorter powerbook screens.

And... the bad news. I installed the nagware. You can now only have a few titles before you'll be asked to register. Sorry about that, it's part of the deal I'm afraid.

I've skipped beta version 6 (it wasn't pretty) and gone straight to beta 7. Go get your download.

Well, I've found the Accordion 10.3 incompatibility. It's documented, but strangely the Interface Builder doesn't flag it when you're building your interface. There is a very handy binding: attributedString, that you can use on an NSTextView in 10.4 that does not exist in 10.3.

OK, bug found, should be an easy fix, right? Just use whatever other binding was there in 10.3. What is it? That binding is directly to an NSData object. The NSTextView just archives the data as an RTFD data stream and stuffs it into the NSData. Great.

No problem so far. The only challenge is when I need to add a link to the text I have to convert back to an attributed string, add the link attachment, convert back to the NSData RTFD object, setValueForKey -- done. What could possibly go wrong?

What goes wrong is that the only command for converting between an attributedString and an RTFD data stream seems to strip of link attachments.

Wait, you're telling me that the single attachment that I need to add is the single one that's stripped off? Oh, the irony is palpable. Murphy is laughing at me!

It's taken me a few days to come to grips with this reality and realize that it wasn't something I was doing, search all the archives and find that others have had this problem as well.

So what am I left with?

1. Connect in this text view without bindings. This is going to be a real pain since everything else uses bindings.

2. Add attributedString as a custom binding -- but only in 10.3. No thanks. Version specific code is hard, custom bindings are hard, put them together and I'm guessing it would be an untestable nightmare.

3. Do some bizarre backflip that uses bindings in a non-standard way. Like removing, archiving, de-archiving, adding -- with the link attachment somewhere in there. Naaah, doesn't even sound feasible when I write it in English, much less Objective-C.

4. Modifying the RTFD data directly. Oh yeah, that sounds fun. I've always wanted to write an RTF parser.

So I guess it's #1. But don't hold your breath. This is going to take me a little while.

By the way, if someone else knows the magic incantation to get from NSData to NSAttributedString back to NSData without stripping attributes, then please, please, please, send me an email.

I'm releasing the latest beta of Accordion to the public today. If you've never used it, this a good chance to see it working in all its glory. If you have used it before then you'll definitely want to download it again. It's got a ton of new features, here are some of the highlights:
Add background images.
Adjust the style of titles/content
Apply an arbitrary CSS tag to titles/content
Adjust the speed of the open/close
Optional Click-To-Close behavior
Optional Start With All Items Closed

And it's universal. It'll work with either RW 3.5 or RW 3.2.

Come and get your download!