Huffington Post: Rupert Murdoch Says Obama Will Win

I don't know how to feel about this. Rupert Murdoch – you know, the man who owns News Corp, corporate entity over of Fox News? That Rupert Murdoch said this about Obama:

"He is a rock star. It's fantastic … I love what he is saying about education … I don't think he will win Florida … but he will win in Ohio and the election … I am anxious to meet him."

He also didn't have too many kind words to spare regarding McCain, calling him "unpredictable" and asking, "What's he really stand for?" The man overseeing the news outlet that has been responsible for more lies and misinformation about Obama than about anyone is now all but endorsing him? What's that squealing in the air?



CleanTechnica: 3 Hidden Costs of High Oil Prices

In my opinion, opening up further drilling sites is like putting a Band-Aid on a tumor. Yes, it will put some people's minds at ease in the short-term, but the problem still exists. Only by branching out into alternative energy sources that don't rely on fossil fuels in any way can we break out of this economic and environmental pit.



RapidWeaver 4.0

Realmac software just released an update to their website-creation tool RapidWeaver. Unfortunately, it's Leopard-only, so I won't be upgrading soon. I highly recommend RapidWeaver to anyone wanting to publish their own blog or website.

Update: Here are the release notes.



GameTrailers: Prince of Persia: Next Gen

So the team working on this (if I'm not mistaken) also worked on TMNT and Assassin's Creed. Both of these games featured gameplay elements similar to that of the previous Prince of Persia trilogy with some co-op and environmental enhancements. From the looks of this trailer, it appears TMNT's over-the-top co-op attacks as well as the expansive environments from Assassin's Creed are coming home to the Prince.

From what I've read, this game also seems to be influenced by Okami both in visual style and themes. Good stuff.



I'm so excited by this, I might just have to play the Sands of Time trilogy over again!

Tags: politics, rapidweaver, video games, environment

The school year is beginning to wrap up, and the next four weeks are going to be insane. Here are some links to keep you busy while I try to figuratively keep my head above water.

TED Talks: Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote



This video literally had me saying "whoa" out-loud!



Kotaku: echochrome Demo Changing Minds Tomorrow



Another amazing yet simple piece of technology – makes me wish for a PS3.



Seattlepi.com: Why Hillary Clinton makes my wife scream

While my wife has never raised her voice at a Clinton story or speech, she has made it clear to me that Senator Clinton has entirely lost her vote at this point. While I believe that voting for policy is more important than voting for a person (even if I find that person subjectively unlikable), I can't help but wonder what a Clinton nomination might do to voter turnout in November.

Perhaps my fears are unfounded.



Infinite Loop: Exclusive preview: RapidWeaver matures with version 4

New version of RapidWeaver coming: Yay! I still don't have Leopard (and it's Leopard-only): Boo!

Tags: video games, politics, rapidweaver, ted, technology

Nobel Intent: The mathematics of language acquisition

Fascinating stuff, and it reinforces the difficulties adults have acquiring new languages. Remember that next you get frustrated that someone is having difficulty with English when they have moved here from another country.



TUAW: Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac delayed until January 2008

This does not make Robert happy, but what can you do?



Realmac Software: What's New in RapidWeaver 3.6.2

All I care about here is the smart publishing bug fix, but some nice new features have been added as well.

Tags: science, microsoft, rapidweaver, education

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

Now that we've looked at RapidWeaver's improvements and drawbacks, this post will be dedicated to looking at two of RapidWeaver's alternatives on the Macintosh as well as some useful add-ons for RW.

iWeb – Apple; Preinstalled; $80 (part of iLife)
If you've bought a Mac in the last year or so, you have iWeb already. iWeb is part of Apple's excellent iLife suite of lifestyle applications. (iMovie, iDVD, Garageband, and iPhoto are also part of the iLife package.) iLife is geared toward making blogs, online newsletters, and photo galleries a simple process. It succeeds in this admirably as long as you are okay with its limitations.

Like Apple's iWork applications, iWeb is heavily template based. You choose what kind of website you want to create, and iWeb offers a set of templates you can choose from. As expected, the templates are well designed and visually pleasant.


choosing an iWeb template

Once you pick a template, editing the site is much like editing a document. You plug in images and text where appropriate, and the process is very fast and fluid. Performance is snappy, and it's possible to generate a nice looking site with little effort and no specialized web knowledge.


editing a site in iWeb

The iWeb experience is great, but the limitations become apparent quickly. First and foremost, straying from the template layout can become a pain – especially in blogging where every new entry reverts back to the default settings. Blogs do not support tags or categories, and there is no easy way to install custom templates or permanently modify those included. Finally, iWeb defaults to PNG images, which are great, but some browsers (read: Internet Explorer) do not always handle them correctly. This means your iWeb page may not look the same in different browsers.

iWeb is a nice application, and I actually prefer working in iWeb over RapidWeaver, but RapidWeaver is far superior in terms of flexibility, features, and browser compatibility.

Sandvox – Karelia Software; $50 (standard), $80 (pro)
Sandvox was introduced scant weeks before the introduction of Apple's iWeb as an alternative to RapidWeaver. Like these other applications, it's purpose is to give non-web designers a simple way to create great looking sites. Sandvox comes in two editions with the Pro version allowing for more direct code interaction and modification. Sandvox has a very unique interface and some interesting options in creating web sites.

Like iWeb and RapidWeaver, Sandvox is template based.


the template gallery

Similar to iWeb, you get to directly edit the site visually. Whenever anything is changed in a sub-page, the homepage is automatically updated to reflect that content. Also, one feature I really like in Sandvox is something called Pagelets where you can add Digg links, Flickr photostreams, RSS feeds, page counters, and other useful content to your sidebar with one click. Sandvox also boasts some nice eye candy in browsing and changing site themes.


editing a site in Sandvox

I feel like Sandvox's blogging tool is awkward, and, like iWeb, there seems to be no support for categories and tags. The templates' properties (like page-width and colors) are not easily modified, and, in stark contrast to RapidWeaver, the developer's website does not facilitate easy discovery of third-party themes, pagelets, and plug-ins. Additionally, sites created in Sandvox have a default homepage that you can't manually bypass or remove.

Out of these three apps, I like Sandvox the least, but your personal preferences may differ. Sandvox is a nice step up from iWeb, but it still falls short of RapidWeaver's standard in my opinion.

Buying Advice: RapidWeaver – Realmac Software; $50
My money went to RapidWeaver before iWeb and Sandvox were even available, but my purchasing advice hasn't changed. RapidWeaver does have a higher learning curve than these alternatives, and it does have some issues, but it is the best way to quickly and inexpensively produce a nice-looking site. It supports every feature a modern website is expected to have, and an active development community creates even more possibilities for the application.

If you already have iWeb on your computer and it meets your needs, go with it. It's a great program and produces nice web pages. However, if you want to move past iWeb's limitations, get RapidWeaver. You won't regret it.

Useful RapidWeaver Resources

Themes. The first place you might want to start expanding RapidWeaver is in your theme collection. There are a number of first and third-party themes available for free and for purchase. Some theme developers include: elixer graphics, Blue Ball Design, Multithemes, and seyDesign. Additionally, Realmac offers some additional business themes and blog themes of their own, and they showcase themes by other developers. Finally, a site called Charcoal on the Wall is a good place to go to browse and preview additional themes.

Plug-ins. Plug-ins extend RapidWeaver's functionality. For example, RapidFLV makes embedding Flash videos a simpler task. RapidBlog integrates RapidWeaver with Blogger, and YourHead Software offers a number of plug-ins designed to give your website some additional style and polish. Again, be sure to visit Relamac's page of plug-ins for even more great add-ons.

There is even more – downloadable theme styles, code snippets and even some utilities are available to enhance the RapidWeaver experience. In addition to the add-ons section of RapidWeaver's site, the RealMac forums are a great place to discover more about this application and complimentary products.

That wraps up this look at RapidWeaver 3.6. I hope you found it informative and useful – if not at least interesting. RapidWeaver is a great application for simplifying the process of making a web site. It's reasonably priced for the features it offers. It has a great development community built up around it, and I'll definitely be purchasing an upgrade license in the near future. If you have a Mac, and you are interested in setting up a website, you can't go wrong with RapidWeaver.

Tags: opinion, software, rapidweaver

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

As much as I respect and enjoy RapidWeaver as a product, there are some areas in which the software could still use improvement in the new version. Fortunately, RapidWeaver recently saw a 3.6.1 update that resolved a couple of the issues I was going to write about, so that was a welcome surprise.

Inconsistent Performance

iWeb is not one of my favorite Apple products, but one thing it has going for it is performance. It can open and save my website (100+ MB) in mere seconds, sometimes perceptually instantaneously. RapidWeaver is another story. In fact, this is my biggest complaint about RapidWeaver, and, if this one problem was fixed, I'd be satisfied. The simple truth is that loading and saving large documents in RapidWeaver is a pain, and the new version shows no significant improvements in this area.

To test performance, I ran these tests 3-6 times, depending on application crashes and tester errors. I then averaged the numbers. The only open applications were Pages, RapidWeaver, and Activity Monitor. The test computer has a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 1 GB of memory. The document is 122 MB.

Here are the averages of opening my site in RapidWeaver 3.5 and RapidWeaver 3.6:

RW 3.6 only shows real improvement in CPU usage here. RapidWeaver 3.5 suffered two application crashes in this test, and version 3.6 suffered zero. Anecdotally, I've had version 3.5 take up to two minutes to load my site document on several occasions.

Here are the numbers for saving:

Note that version 3.6 is actually more resource-hungry that 3.5 in saving the same document. Neither version crashed while saving. Annoyingly, my computer becomes basically unusable during the saving process, and, again, I've encountered numerous occasions where RapidWeaver 3.5 has taken much longer to save a file than these numbers show.

FInally, take a look at RapidWeaver's overall memory usage. This is memory usage while completely idle:

While using RapidWeaver, it gradually consumes more and more resources. Unfortunately, after quitting, those resources sometimes stay tied up, leaving the computer in a state where performance is going to be generally poor – forcing a restart to reclaim that memory.

This is my biggest complaint about RapidWeaver, and again, I would be happy if performance was the only big issue the Realmac team tackled for version 3.7. I don't know how many other RapidWeaver users share this opinion, but fantastic new features can be tarnished when the most basic tasks – loading and saving – are an aversive experience.

Other Issues

I really only a few additional complaints about RapidWeaver 3.6. The inability to create tables within the application is a pain. (The tables in this post are screenshots of Pages.) Not all included themes take advantage of the Theme Styles I praised in the previous post. All new themes have flexible color settings while many of the older themes do not. It would also be nice if user's could link to hosted images rather than embedding them into the blog file. Finally, there is still no easy way to set a site's default font. If I want my blog to be in a different font, I would either have to edit the css file or change the font one entry at a time.

That's really it as far as criticism goes. RapidWeaver is a very nice application with just a few small issues. For me, performance is the biggest issue, and, if that could be resolved, RapidWeaver 3.6 would be a near-perfect application for my purposes.

In the next post about RapidWeaver, I'll share some info about competing products, useful add-ons, and buying advice for version 3.6.

Update: You can in fact link to images in the blog editor. You just have to use "img src=" bracketed by < >. (I was making a mistake!)

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

Though the blogging tool is certainly the most important to me, RapidWeaver has seen some further improvements in its most recent point release. In this post, we'll take a look at some of those other enhancements.

Photo Albums

The interface for creating photo albums has hardly changed at all, except for the removal of picture previews and the ability to add some text at the top of the album page. Those seem like strange omissions, and it makes me wonder if I am perhaps merely missing something in the interface.

x
3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

The real change comes with the way the photo album module handles Flash slideshows. The previous version looked nice already, but the new slideshow offers better navigation, background audio, a variety of transitions, and the "Ken Burns" effect.

x
3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

FInally, the photo album offers integration with Flickr photostreams. All you have to do is have a Flickr RSS feed, and RapidWeaver will showcase your hosted pictures.

Theme Styles

This feature has been pretty heavily emphasized, and I have to admit that it's a welcome addition to the software. In previous versions of RapidWeaver, a theme might have a predetermined set of color schemes, but, for real control, you had to resort to opening the theme package and editing the css stylesheet.

x
3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

This new feature gives you nearly unlimited control over the way colors are used on your site. However, for control freaks, some css editing might still be necessary. This features is not currently implemented consistently across all themes, and we'll take a look at that in my next post.

The Kitchen Sink

RapidWeaver 3.6 also boasts a number of other small improvements that make the software even better. A Snippets pane allows you to store commonly-accessed HTML code for easy retrieval. The application has improved making lists. The various inspectors have been consolidated and simplified – making for better usability. The software also performs better overall (with a couple of caveats). In all, RapidWeaver 3.6 is an impressive update filled with great new features and welcome improvements.

In the next installment, we'll take a look at some of the issues I've run into using this software. Stay tuned!

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

I spend most of my time in the blog editor of RapidWeaver, so I'm going to concentrate on that component for the entirety of this post. You can see in the screenshots below that the interface for editing blogs has not changed much since the last version. Some interface elements have been added, but little else has changed. However, those small changes add up to some welcome new capabilities.

x
3.5 on the left • 3.6 on the right

Instead of using drop-down menus for categories, RW 3.6 uses a text field that will auto-complete as you type. Tapping Return/Enter will add the category. This text field also facilitates adding multiple categories to a post – a welcome enhancement to RapidWeaver's blogging tool.


title and category in 3.5


title and categories in 3.6

Tagging works much the same way in RW 3.6. This generates a tag cloud in your sidebar with frequently-used tags appearing in larger text than more infrequently used tags. This is another feature I'm excited to see appear.

x
a couple of RapidWeaver tag clouds

The only other real difference I noted in blog editing is the fact that you can now choose whether or not an entry is published from the main list. In the previous RapidWeaver version, you had to select a post first, then choose to publish it or not.



Overall, the enhancements to the blog editing tool in RapidWeaver are welcome changes. The typing of categories and tags really goes much more quickly than menus. (Fortunately, tapping Esc will bring up a list of categories and tags.)

The enhancements look minor, but they bring a lot of nice functionality to blogging with RW. I've already begun converting the blog portions of this site over to RapidWeaver 3.6, but it's going to take a while due to some snags I've run into with the migration process. (That will be a topic for a later post.) Next time we'll take a look at some of the other new features – including a nicely improved photo gallery.

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

Realmac Software

The new version of their web page creator comes with a new look for their site. It seems very Delicious Monster-inspired. I'll post some thoughts on RapidWeaver 3.6 in a few days after putting it through some paces.





Guardian Unlimited: A drive for global domination has put us in greater danger

Here's another edited excerpt from Gore's most recent book, The Assault on Reason. I need to stop doing this. I'm bordering dangerously close to becoming a political blog!



Raw Story: Cheney criticizes the Geneva Conventions in Military Academy commencement address

I'm not a Cheny fan. (After all, my man-crush is on Al Gore). However, I don't agree that Cheny is necessarily criticizing the Geneva Conventions in this speech as much as he is trying to (clumsily) illustrate a moral distinction between American combatants and some of the opposition they face.

However, this quote from his speech is something I could take issue with:

"They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again. And now they have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war against civilization."

I'm sorry, who chose to make Iraq the "central front" again?



Ars Technica: Ex-military leaders call climate change a national security issue

I never thought of global warming in terms of terrorism, but there you go.



Opposable Thumbs: First look: 1.80 firmware update for PlayStation 3 truly impresses

Every PS3 patch makes the machine that much more compelling. It has no longer become a question of if we get a PS3 as much as when.

Tags: politics, environment, video games, rapidweaver

RealMac Software Weblog: RapidWeaver 3.6, feature two...

Tags and multiple categories make me very happy. Clusters are nice too. Now I just need to set up a Flickr stream, so I can look like the cool blogs!

Tags: rapidweaver