The Carousel Public Beta is on our site and ready to go. There are still a few rough spots here and there, but they should be pretty hard to find. We've been hard at work testing it in many environments and are pleased to say that it seems to work well on a wide variety of themes and in all the major browswers (Yes, even IE). So...

Go get your download.

Carousel allows you to save all your style settings to a file. I'm setting up a place in our forum where you can go to share the styles that you've made. I've posted a few styles to get you started. Check it out.

RapidWeaver has recently been beta testing an upcoming release. No one knows when it will get here, but there's one thing that's for sure -- it will be incompatible with previous versions of Accordion. So, if you're using Accordion and you'd like to update when the new RapidWeaver comes out...

Go get your download!


Oh, and one more thing...
I posted a live demo of Carousel. That's kinda neat too.

and two steps back.

Today I finished work on the icon for Carousel. I will probably add more polish to it over the next few weeks, but I think it's pretty good. Pretty good for a non-graphic artist, anyway.

But today I was informed about two bugs in Accordion. So those will have to be patched before I start the rollout of Carousel. Hopefully things should start moving pretty quickly now.

We'll shoot for Accordion tomorrow and a wider audience for the Carousel beta starting later in the week -- but no promises -- there's still plenty to do.

For the release of both Accordion and Blocks I allowed people into an expanded, but not fully public beta test after they blogged a little about it. I'll probably do the same thing for Carousel. Since most of the RW community has a blog, it's not a high hurdle, but it does require a certain geek factor to participate -- which is good in the early beta days.

Accordion 1.1 is out now. It's got a few nice new touches, and it's a free update, so...

Go get your download!

On the outside this release changes only some small things:

• You can now add more than one Accordion to a Blocks page.
• More efficient animation
• Initial load is much nicer -- no more stutter
• You can now add a "fade" to the animation

However, there are a lot of behind the scenes changes that make this a much more important update than might be noticeable to the average rapid weaver. So just to satisfy your curiosity, here's a few of the deep down changes that were made:

• disabling a style disables that area of the interface
• drag and drop works better now in the table
• clear button for 10.3 image clearing
• no more inline <style> tags -- strict, baby, strict, yeah!
• removed customized css classes from the interface
• smaller and highly compressed javascript footprint
• no more <a> link in the title -- which caused some clicks to get ignored.
• now uses standard-issue mootools -- so it's compatible with Carousel

Updated: I corrected a bug in how firefox parses some of the initial loading javascript. And I have corrected incompatibilities with Clouds -- an Elixir Graphics theme that uses an older version of moo.fx. These changes are now included in version 1.1.2

I just thought I'd post a quick note to let everyone know that the Screen Casts Online discount will be running out very soon. It's about as deep a discount as we will ever give, so get it quick before it's gone.