Henk is at it again and it looks like he’s produced dozens and dozens of new Collage styles. A lot of cool alpha-transparency effects and some nice simple stuff too. I think you 48 styles for ten bucks, what a deal.

Jump on over to Henk’s site and have a look: http://www.henkvrieselaar.com/collage-styles/

We’re expecting a new version of RapidWeaver, with support for automatic updating plugins to come any minute now. (oh-please-oh-please-oh-please!!!)

We’re pushing out one more update to Collage that we hope takes care of all the weird little bugs that cropped up with images, sparkle updaters, and everything else.

We strongly urge all our customers who use Collage to update if they have a chance. Use manual updating this time and with any luck all future updates will be automated.

Download: Collage 2.0.5

Collage 2 Update

Today we’re releasing a small patch to Collage. This should hopefully smooth some problems that cropped up when RapidWeaver 4.2 was released. RapidWeaver 4.2 changed the file caching mechanisms and caused Collage to lose track of its images if directories were moved around -- such as when the page was renamed.
Of course this version is recommended for all users of RapidWeaver 4.2 and works well with RapidWeaver 4.1.3 as well.

Update: We’ve made one more change. So we’ve pushed the revision number up to 2.0.4.

Collage 2: Get it Now

Bug Fixes

• Changing the name of a page in RapidWeaver 4.2 no longer causes Collage to loose it's images.
• Dragging a new image into the preview area now properly updates the image browser.
• Image loading is now faster for large images.
• Image data is cached more aggressively to reduce memory overhead for large files. NB: This doesn't mean that you should have a very large file. If your file sizes are growing a lot ask on the RapidWeaver forum how you can divide it up.

Requirements

You must have RapidWeaver 4.1.3 to use Collage 2.

How much?

This is a free update if you’re already a Collage 2 registered users.
If you purchased Collage 1 then the upgrade to Collage 2 is just $7.95.

How do I install it?

The easiest way to install it is to:

1. Open RapidWeaver
2. Close any open documents.
3. Download the Collage 2 disk image here.
4. Double click on the Collage plugin in the disk image window.
5. Quit and restart RapidWeaver

How do I get it?

Jump over to our Collage page and grab a copy.

Collage 2 Update

We’re rolling up a number of bug-fixes, refinements and adding automatic updating. This release is recommended to everyone who is using Collage, especially if you are using RapidWeaver 4.1.3.

Collage 2: Get it Now

Bug Fixes

• Missing images no longer cause RapidWeaver to hang while saving files.
• Swtiching to Collage pages is now significantly faster.
• Changing details of custom styles no longer loses info.
• Applying styles after resizing image browsers no longer causes crashes.
• When lightboxes are disabled, Collage will include a space between the href and other properties of an anchor tag. And should now validate xHTML strict again.

New Features

Like a lot of our plugins, we’re adding Sparkle automatic updating. This means that Collage will notice any future releases and download them automatically.

Requirements

You must have RapidWeaver 4.1 to use Collage 2.

How much?

This is a free update if you’re already a Collage 2 registered users.
If you purchased Collage 1 then the upgrade to Collage 2 is just $7.95.

How do I install it?

The easiest way to install it is to:

1. Open RapidWeaver
2. Close any open documents.
3. Download the Collage 2 disk image here.
4. Double click on the Collage plugin in the disk image window.
5. Quit and restart RapidWeaver

How do I upgrade?

This time we’re doing things a bit differently. Collage 2 is such a huge change from Collage 1 that we decided updating your existing Collage pages just wouldn’t produce quality output. Images would suffer because Collage 1 saves small images and Collage 2 needs nice big images for Slideshows and Lightboxes. So we decided that you should probably migrate you pages slowly, using the original images, that’s the way Collage 2 works best. Here’s what you need to know:

• Q: Will my Collage 1 pages be upgraded automatically?
  A: No, you should rebuild them from the original images.
• Q: Can I keep my old Collage 1 pages while building new Collage 2 pages?
  A: Yes! Collage 1 and Collage 2 run side by side.
• Q: Do I need to uninstall Collage 2 to run RapidWeaver 3.6?
  A: No. RW3 will ignore Collage 2.

How do I get it?

Jump over to our Collage page and grab a copy.

Collage 2 is finally here!

If you’ve been waiting for the beta testing to be done, your wait is finally over. Collage 2 is ready for download. In case you missed the announcement with all the feature details, I’ve listed some of the details below.

Collage 2: Get it Now

New Features

We’ve been hard at work on this new Collage for almost six months, so there’s quite a bit to talk about. Read about all the new features here or jump over to our Collage pages and check out some screenshots. Our screenshots even use Collage... to show off Collage!

AJAX Slideshow

Add a super cool animated slideshow with AJAX image loading. Just one click and Collage does the rest for you.

Image Editing

Now you can zoom, scale, and crop your images just by grabbing them with the mouse and dragging them into position. Or, click on the auto-reset and your image will automatically be scaled to perfectly fit into the Collage thumbnail.

New Styles

We’ve added a new Styles window. If you’ve used Kwix or Carousel, you’ll be familiar with it. Even better, we’ve begged, bartered, and bribed Elixir Graphics into creating a few professional grade Collage Styles that are built right in. They even did our super cool icon too!

Cool Effects

Everyone loves the light-box effect. Now you can have it right inside your Collage. No more Javascript wrangling or Flash incompatibilities, either. With just one click Collage will scale images, add the Javascript, and upload everything for you.
Plus you can add even more description to your images without cluttering up your pages with a Hover box. Turn on hover boxes and a nice little box will pop up when the user moves the mouse over your images.

Loads of Graphic Options

Now there are even more ways to make your collage unique. There are a lot of new things to set, here’s the big list:

• Image Backgrounds
• Image Masking
• Image Overlays
• Selectable Corner Rounding
• Set the Rounding Radius
• More settings for your shadows
• More settings for your reflections
• Edge fading

Mouseover Effects

Every single graphic setting can be changed when a user hovers their mouse over a thumbnail. It makes it simple to produce eye grabbing interactivity. Simply copy over your idle-state settings and change, change a few settings, and voila!, you’ve got a professional mouseover effect.

And there’s so much more!

A live preview window to see all your settings in real time, xHTML strict coding, AJAX image loading, Fade-Out slideshow controls, higher quality thumbnails, and of course, better IE support than ever.

RapidWeaver 4

Collage 2 uses all the great new RapidWeaver 4 API calls. That means that we have much more control over the way we manage images and save files. Collage doesn’t degrade your images at all. Collage “hard links” to the original files, just like Time Machine does. It doesn’t take any extra space on your hard disk, but if you accidentally delete the original Collage will (as if by magic) make sure that a copy is safe and sound inside your RapidWeaver file. It’s like having your cake and eating it too!

Leopard

Leopard gave us the power to add some great upgrades to the Collage interface. We take advantage of some great animation effects and use Leopards built in image browsers to give you all the speed and power Mac users are used to. But don’t worry, we didn’t go over the top. In Collage 2 form still follows function.

Requirements

You must have RapidWeaver 4 to use Collage 2.

How much?

If you purchased Collage in the past three months then Collage 2 is a free upgrade.
If you purchased Collage before that then the upgrade to Collage 2 is just $7.95.
If you’re new to Collage then it’s $14.95.
If you qualify for a free update we’ll contact you via the email address you registered with. If you don’t receive an email or believe your email address has changed feel free to send an email to support and just ask -- we want to make sure you get the bargain that was promised.

How do I install it?

The easiest way to install it is to:

1. Open RapidWeaver
2. Close any open documents.
3. Download the Collage 2 disk image here.
4. Double click on the Collage plugin in the disk image window.
5. Quit and restart RapidWeaver

How do I upgrade?

This time we’re doing things a bit differently. Collage 2 is such a huge change from Collage 1 that we decided updating your existing Collage pages just wouldn’t produce quality output. Images would suffer because Collage 1 saves small images and Collage 2 needs nice big images for Slideshows and Lightboxes. So we decided that you should probably migrate you pages slowly, using the original images, that’s the way Collage 2 works best. Here’s what you need to know:

• Q: Will my Collage 1 pages be upgraded automatically?
  A: No, you should rebuild them from the original images.
• Q: Can I keep my old Collage 1 pages while building new Collage 2 pages?
  A: Yes! Collage 1 and Collage 2 run side by side.
• Q: Do I need to uninstall Collage 2 to run RapidWeaver 3.6?
  A: No. RW3 will ignore Collage 2.

How do I get it?

Jump over to our Collage page and grab a copy.

We’ve been hard at work eliminating bugs and making refinements to Collage. We’re quickly closing in on the final release. But there were some more changes added to broaden our compatibility with a number of 3rd party themes. Collage works with just about every theme out there even some of the tough ones. We’ve even created a few test pages in some of the themes that we’ve been working with. Our test pages are published in PNG -- which is quite slow for the lightbox, we always recommend publishing lightboxes in JPEG -- but just to stress the system we did it.

Collage 2 Beta 3: Get it Now

What’s New

Most of our changes this time were to fix bugs, but we did add one new feature that we know everyone wanted:

• Headers and Footer are back. Look in the settings under the Text tab. They support full styled-text and even come with the new RapidWeaver 4.0 toolbar. Yeah!
• Content was added to Preview mode only to help users if they have content or themes that are breaking Collage.
• The image browser is now styled with Drag Images Here when it’s empty to help new users. It has a very nice Core Graphics fade-in too.

What’s Fixed

Many of the changes were to correct compatibility with a particular theme or a particular browser, these aren’t included in the list below, but rest assured there are dozens of small tweaks:

• Saving and Opening files takes less memory and should be faster too.
• Turning off the Grid in the Layout tab now packs items wherever they fit.
• Title and Subtitle should not be cut off any more, even if you enter a lot of text.
• Row height will grow to accommodate large titles/subtitles.
• CSS improved for when page is loaded without Javascript. No more red squares.
• Color pallet works in Headers and Footers (bug in RapidWeaver).
• CSS classes were added to the semantic content to help ease theming.
• There is more feedback for people entering upgrade serial numbers into the registration window.
• Compensated for a RapidWeaver memory leak in image loading API.
• You can now place HTML into the Title, Subtitle, and Hover Box (obvious cautions apply, of course).

What Else?

If you missed out on the original Collage announcement you might want to read that post. It details lots of the cool features and new exiting changes.

Requirements

You must have RapidWeaver 4 to use Collage 2.

How much?

If you purchased Collage in the past three months then Collage 2 is a free upgrade. If this is you and you haven’t heard from us, please send us an email.
If you purchased Collage before that then the upgrade to Collage 2 is just $7.95.
If you’re new to Collage then it’s $14.95.

How do I install it?

The easiest way to install it is to:

1. Open RapidWeaver
2. Close any open documents.
3. Download the Collage 2 disk image here.
4. Double click on the Collage plugin in the disk image window.
5. Quit and restart RapidWeaver

How do I upgrade?

This time we’re doing things a bit differently. Collage 2 is such a huge change from Collage 1 that we decided updating your existing Collage pages just wouldn’t produce quality output. Images would suffer because Collage 1 saves small images and Collage 2 needs nice big images for Slideshows and Lightboxes. So we decided that you should probably migrate you pages slowly, using the original images, that’s the way Collage 2 works best. Here’s what you need to know:

• Q: Will my Collage 1 pages be upgraded automatically?
  A: No, you should rebuild them from the original images.
• Q: Can I keep my old Collage 1 pages while building new Collage 2 pages?
  A: Yes! Collage 1 and Collage 2 run side by side.
• Q: Do I need to uninstall Collage 2 to run RapidWeaver 3.6?
  A: No. RW3 will ignore Collage 2.

How do I get it?

Jump over to our Collage page and grab a copy.

Collage 2 is out, in beta, and loads of fun, but now what?
Want to get that extra edge to make your site perfect. Check this out: Elixir Collage 2 Styles. Elixir has created some really great graphics and packaged them up in an easy to use package. Just download, install, and you’re ready to run.
All the graphics are high-quality 512x512 images and include beutiful images and masks that work together to create some really stunning effects.
And you get it all fro just $7.95.

Go grab it!

Collage 2 is a pretty complex piece of software for a plug-in. It’s still nowhere approaching Blocks sort of size, but it far surpasses any of our other plugins. As such our first beta was, well... well... it was rough. It was buggy, even for a beta. With so many changes to the plugin as well as to RapidWeaver it was probably bound to happen, but it was a bit more than we bargained for. We’ve had to roll up our sleeves and spend a lot of late night hours squashing all the bugs.
We’ve also taken a lot more time to test more themes, more machines, and more data. I suspect there may yet be some difficult bugs in beta 2, but with all the great bug reporting from our users, loads of detailed tests, and lots of help from the themers, this release (we hope) will be much more enjoyable for everyone.

Collage 2 Beta 2: Get it Now

What’s New & What’s Fixed

Our primary goal with this release was to get rid of any bugs we could find, to make Collage faster, and more usable for everyone, and to eliminate any incompatibilities that were found in Beta 1. That means no new features, but a whole lot of fixes. Here’s the big list of what we fixed:

• Image previews no longer duplicate the first item on PPC machines.
• Apply button no longer locks up after the first few clicks.
• Wait spin cursor is no longer missing sometimes.
• Drag and drop no longer has off by one error when reordering images.
• PNG replacement scripts of many themes no longer cause disappearing Collage in IE 6
• Some incompatibilities fixed between Moo.fx based themes
• Zoom made more smooth and a bit slower
• Zoom no longer distorts image
• Hover box styles work with more themes
• File loading and saving times improved

What Else?

If you missed out on the original Collage announcement you might want to read that post. It details lots of the cool features and new exiting changes.

Requirements

You must have RapidWeaver 4 to use Collage 2.

How much?

If you purchased Collage in the past three months then Collage 2 is a free upgrade.
If you purchased Collage before that then the upgrade to Collage 2 is just $7.95.
If you’re new to Collage then it’s $14.95.
If you qualify for a free update we’ll contact you via the email address you registered with. If you don’t receive an email or believe your email address has changed feel free to send an email to support and just ask -- we want to make sure you get the bargain that was promised.

How do I install it?

The easiest way to install it is to:

1. Open RapidWeaver
2. Close any open documents.
3. Download the Collage 2 disk image here.
4. Double click on the Collage plugin in the disk image window.
5. Quit and restart RapidWeaver

How do I upgrade?

This time we’re doing things a bit differently. Collage 2 is such a huge change from Collage 1 that we decided updating your existing Collage pages just wouldn’t produce quality output. Images would suffer because Collage 1 saves small images and Collage 2 needs nice big images for Slideshows and Lightboxes. So we decided that you should probably migrate you pages slowly, using the original images, that’s the way Collage 2 works best. Here’s what you need to know:

• Q: Will my Collage 1 pages be upgraded automatically?
  A: No, you should rebuild them from the original images.
• Q: Can I keep my old Collage 1 pages while building new Collage 2 pages?
  A: Yes! Collage 1 and Collage 2 run side by side.
• Q: Do I need to uninstall Collage 2 to run RapidWeaver 3.6?
  A: No. RW3 will ignore Collage 2.

How do I get it?

Jump over to our Collage page and grab a copy.

What’s still not fixed in this beta

Although we have eliminated a number of issues we still know of a handful of cosmetic issues. We’re also aware that if you have about 10 Collage pages things start to slow down more than they should. And the header and footer still have yet to make their reappearance. Don’t worry, they’ll be back.

Happy Release Day!

With the release of RapidWeaver 4 we can finally let everyone see Collage 2. We’re still beta testing, but we’d love it if you would download it and help us work out the last few bugs. The beta is quite stable and definitely ready for real world use.

Collage 2 Beta 1: Get it Now

New Features

We’ve been hard at work on this new Collage for almost six months, so there’s quite a bit to talk about. Read about all the new features here or jump over to our Collage pages and check out some screenshots. Our screenshots even use Collage... to show off Collage!

AJAX Slideshow

Add a super cool animated slideshow with AJAX image loading. Just one click and Collage does the rest for you.

Image Editing

Now you can zoom, scale, and crop your images just by grabbing them with the mouse and dragging them into position. Or, click on the auto-reset and your image will automatically be scaled to perfectly fit into the Collage thumbnail.

New Styles

We’ve added a new Styles window. If you’ve used Kwix or Carousel, you’ll be familiar with it. Even better, we’ve begged, bartered, and bribed Elixir Graphics into creating a few professional grade Collage Styles that are built right in. They even did our super cool icon too!

Cool Effects

Everyone loves the light-box effect. Now you can have it right inside your Collage. No more Javascript wrangling or Flash incompatibilities, either. With just one click Collage will scale images, add the Javascript, and upload everything for you.
Plus you can add even more description to your images without cluttering up your pages with a Hover box. Turn on hover boxes and a nice little box will pop up when the user moves the mouse over your images.

Loads of Graphic Options

Now there are even more ways to make your collage unique. There are a lot of new things to set, here’s the big list:

• Image Backgrounds
• Image Masking
• Image Overlays
• Selectable Corner Rounding
• Set the Rounding Radius
• More settings for your shadows
• More settings for your reflections
• Edge fading

Mouseover Effects

Every single graphic setting can be changed when a user hovers their mouse over a thumbnail. It makes it simple to produce eye grabbing interactivity. Simply copy over your idle-state settings and change, change a few settings, and voila!, you’ve got a professional mouseover effect.

And there’s so much more!

A live preview window to see all your settings in real time, xHTML strict coding, AJAX image loading, Fade-Out slideshow controls, higher quality thumbnails, and of course, better IE support than ever.

RapidWeaver 4

Collage 2 uses all the great new RapidWeaver 4 API calls. That means that we have much more control over the way we manage images and save files. Collage doesn’t degrade your images at all. Collage “hard links” to the original files, just like Time Machine does. It doesn’t take any extra space on your hard disk, but if you accidentally delete the original Collage will (as if by magic) make sure that a copy is safe and sound inside your RapidWeaver file. It’s like having your cake and eating it too!

Leopard

Leopard gave us the power to add some great upgrades to the Collage interface. We take advantage of some great animation effects and use Leopards built in image browsers to give you all the speed and power Mac users are used to. But don’t worry, we didn’t go over the top. In Collage 2 form still follows function.

Requirements

You must have RapidWeaver 4 to use Collage 2.

How much?

If you purchased Collage in the past three months then Collage 2 is a free upgrade.
If you purchased Collage before that then the upgrade to Collage 2 is just $7.95.
If you’re new to Collage then it’s $14.95.
If you qualify for a free update we’ll contact you via the email address you registered with. If you don’t receive an email or believe your email address has changed feel free to send an email to support and just ask -- we want to make sure you get the bargain that was promised.

How do I install it?

The easiest way to install it is to:

1. Open RapidWeaver
2. Close any open documents.
3. Download the Collage 2 disk image here.
4. Double click on the Collage plugin in the disk image window.
5. Quit and restart RapidWeaver

How do I upgrade?

This time we’re doing things a bit differently. Collage 2 is such a huge change from Collage 1 that we decided updating your existing Collage pages just wouldn’t produce quality output. Images would suffer because Collage 1 saves small images and Collage 2 needs nice big images for Slideshows and Lightboxes. So we decided that you should probably migrate you pages slowly, using the original images, that’s the way Collage 2 works best. Here’s what you need to know:

• Q: Will my Collage 1 pages be upgraded automatically?
  A: No, you should rebuild them from the original images.
• Q: Can I keep my old Collage 1 pages while building new Collage 2 pages?
  A: Yes! Collage 1 and Collage 2 run side by side.
• Q: Do I need to uninstall Collage 2 to run RapidWeaver 3.6?
  A: No. RW3 will ignore Collage 2.

How do I get it?

Jump over to our Collage page and grab a copy.

Oh, And there’s One More Thing

We really tried hard to get rid of the Header and Footer sections of the original Collage. You won’t find them in this release at all. Why? Well, people have been quite successful at using Kwix without them and we thought it would be great to eliminate all that complex code in Collage too.
But, then we sent the Collage 2 beta copies around for private testing. It’s been pretty much unanimous that we really screwed up. We’re sorry. We promise it won’t happen again. :-)
We’ll put back the headers and footers before the final release. But it’s a lot more code than you might imagine, so be patient while we hammer it out.

I can’t show you Collage 2. Collage 2 requires RapidWeaver 4 and RapidWeaver 4 is still in private beta testing.

But I can give you a sneak peek of some Collage 2 output. This is just a little test. It barely even scratches the surface, but you can see a couple cool features:

Nifty Cool Stuff

- One rounded corner.
- Text positioned over the reflection.
- Cool overlay image (from Elixir Graphics).
- Image changes when you mouse-over.
- !!! Lightbox !!!

Other Nice Stuff

- Collage is valid strict for the first time ever.
- Degrades to a semantic equivalent page when no JS is available.

Not Quite Done

Internet Explorer on Windows is really really hard to make work well. We’re still working on our IE compatibility. I have two bugs on the bug list for IE6. We’re still in beta, that’s for sure. So please, if you do notice a bug in IE -- report it -- and rest assured that it’ll be IE compatible before I put it on the download page.

Check it Out