cataLog, RapidWeaver and good timing

Wow! I am blown away by the response to our latest theme cataLog Pro. In what I think is both a case of timing and luck, cataLog Pro for RapidWeaver 4.0 has surpassed any other theme in our library for initial launch numbers. Timing being a factor for a few reasons:

• RapidWeaver 4.0 is fresh in peoples minds
• There is a lot of new activity and 3rd party development surrounding RapidWeaver
• There are a great deal of new users
• RapidWeaver is fast approaching critical mass

And as always, luck can always play a big part in these things. Some themes I've made in the past have been the right idea at the wrong time and have picked up more and more as time went on. cataLog Pro seems to be a case of the right idea at the right time. This, apparently, was a theme that fit the bill for so many people with a need for it at that moment. I've received countess emails to that effect, "This is exactly what I needed for a project I was starting."

With RapidWeaver really taking off as it has off late, I really ought to do another talk at WatRMUG (Waterloo Regional Mac Users Group) and reintroduce the Kitchener-Waterloo users to website building, the RapidWeaver way.

seyDesign 2008 made the cut

With all the commotion as of late it must have totally passed me by that seyDesign.com got a permanent listing on DesignSnack (probably a few weeks back now). It's always an honor to appear on sites like these, especially this one, because it helps you gauge your designs and see if you are really making the grade. Go ahead and give it a vote if you like seyDesign 2008.

I think it was more than a year ago now when the 2007 version of seyDesign got listed on this site so it's nice to see that my designs are still on track and hopefully improving in the public eye. And speaking of seyDesign 2007, that site is actually appearing in Design Meltdown's The Web Designers Idea Book, due out in October, which is just about the biggest honor any web designer can have bestowed upon him. Hopefully the site appears in a good light and not as an example of what not to do, lol. So if you are a seyDoggy or seyDesign fan, or just a fan of great web design, head over to the Design Meltdown store and pre-order your copy.

Enter The Web

I took a support call from a customer one time and it came up in conversation that he uses WYSIWYG web editors such as RapidWeaver or DreamWeaver to visualize what he is doing with his web designs. He then asked me what I use... "Nothing," I replied, "not until I am done, pretty much."

Baffled, he asked how I could possibly grasp what was going on without seeing it in from of me. I proceeded to compare it to a musician reading sheet music. The musician doesn't need to here the music to know what it will sound like when performed off the sheet. That analogy did nothing form him.

I then drew the comparison to The Matrix, "You know when there are watching all those characters fall on the screen, but to them it paints a picture of what's going on in there? It's the same thing for me (and most web designers I imagine)."

"Wow!" he says, "So you can just see it in your head?"

"Yup."

"Cool," he says, contemplatively, "can you fly too?"

Sadly no.

seyDoggy and RapidWeaver, a new approach

What am I up to right now? Doing what I love doing best; creating new works of wonder for a platform... erm... designing themes for RapidWeaver.

I know I am only speaking to 5-8% of the general population when I say this, but if you are one of the lucky ones who owns a mac, then you owe it to yourself to at least check out RapidWeaver. It's a great, do-it-yourself web authoring app that is insanely extensible by virtue of its proud and dedicated 3rd party development community (of which I am a long standing member).

I have been developing RapidWeaver themes on a professional level for nearly three years. In that time themes have gotten more and more advanced with each new version of the platform. Cric from Rapid-Ideas was the first theme developer to really take themes to that new level of versatility years back when he introduced the first theme boasting some 500,000 variations. Pretty soon we all followed suit.

Before long though (myself included), we all had products that would take a month or more to complete, nearly as long to update, would upload dozens of css files, a multitude of images and scripts, complex themes mean more support... themes and the site they make were getting slow and fat! The mental taxation on the end user swimming in a sea of variation to make a site that only uses 10% of a themes ability is immeasurable. And it goes without saying that this method of theme development is getting costly, especially if a new theme is a dud.

For the last few years I have been looking at ways and approaches to trim the fat. #1 priority was to eliminate support. While developing themes for THEME WEAVER I really looked at streamlining their approach so that support would be nearly non existent. I found that fewer options in a RapidWeaver theme were the key. This was hard to adopt in my own, already established theme library, so I looked at ways of simplifying the user experience.

To do this I started to employ javascript to do some of the dirty work for the end user; rounding corners, adding drop shadows, etc... But with this came compatibility issues with other 3rd party RapidWeaver products, namely plugins that used javascript as well. Though things were getting easier for the end user, for me? not so much. For the last year I have been enjoying great success with very little support; a stellar combination, but on the back of an aging library of themes. I needed new products, ones that I think are hot, designed the way I want them, easy to use, require little support, lightweight, cost effective to make...

That's when the lightbulb went off. I want to make themes for me, a designer... I want to make designer themes! And so a new line was born at seyDesign.com; Designer themes, a new line of RapidWeaver themes that are just good looking and nothing else. Not ground breaking, not revolutionary, not stuffed with feature over feature... just hot themes!

Yesterday saw the release of the first RapidWeaver theme born of my new approach; Tagg.

iPhone 3G, Apple App Store and FlipSide5

With the launch of both the new iPhone 3G and the new Apple App Store, things around seyDoggy have been a little harried trying to cross all our t's and dot all of our i's in preparation for the big day. Everything went smooth without so much as a hiccup. I had to pull a couple of all nighters but all for the good of the site.

So it would appear that both FlipSide5 and Michael Sanford are leaving an indelible mark on the industry. Revered in many articles as the man and company to watch simply for the passion they pour into their products, one thing is clear, the level of commitment is unparalleled (and I speak from experience).

Since everything went fairly smooth, I thought I would take a moment to breeze past my local Rogers store on Ottawa and Fischer-Hallman in Kitchener and scope out the iPhone lines. If the crowds were gone I would have stopped in to grab a 3G. No such luck as the crowd was camped out in lawn chairs and been since the store opened hours before.

It's the whole package that counts.

Sometimes it's not the big things that make all the difference in how a company is perceived as either professional or amateur. Sometimes it's the littlest, nearly overlooked details. A perfect example of this is how a DMG is put together, or how an installer is skinned. This is how I came to find myself killing a few hours today by rebuilding all of the most recent update installers for seyDesign theme updates.

Some time ago, seyDesign.com became the first RapidWeaver theme developer to use update installers to deliver their theme updates in the form of an application that installs only the changed components as opposed to distributing the entire patched theme to end users. seyDesign.com recognized that many users, having had made many modifications to their themes, or having added bits and bobs to their themes innards, did not appreciate all of the work involved in returning their theme to their custom state. Update installers avoids many of these troubles, most of the time.

Being an early pioneer of these practices I hadn't taken a whole lot of time to learn how to make this process my own, instead, treating it as a utility, not another opportunity to spread corporate identity. Since the seyDesign 2008 relaunch, however, I knew that the time was now to make things pretty, to follow suit with the look of the site.

Next up I'll be rebuilding all of the theme DMG's to look just as good.