We're off to WWDC 2009
Four members from Team Realmac will be flying out to San Francisco for WWDC this year. We're all really looking forward to spending a week learning about all the latest Apple technologies'and hanging out with fellow Mac devs!
In preparation for our trip to WWDC (which begins tomorrow!), we've had some shiny new business cards and Realmac t-shirts printed…
In true Realmac style we'll be taking plenty of photos and tweeting like crazy during the week, so be sure to keep an eye on Flickr, and follow our updates on Twitter: Dan Counsell, Ben Counsell, Danny Greg, and Keith Duncan.
See you there!
LittleSnapper 1.0.4 is now available
After the last update to LittleSnapper, a few users started encountering some issues when upgrading their libraries to the new format. We've been hard at work to fix this issue and are pleased to announce that LittleSnapper 1.0.4 (which fixes this library migration issue) is now available!
There's only one fix in this update to ensure smooth library migrations - however we recommend that all users update to the latest version to ensure they're running the latest version of LittleSnapper.
LittleSnapper 1.0.4 is available now via our Downloads page as well as LittleSnapper's built-in Check for Update option.
RapidWeaver 4: Reviewed and Updated
Whilst we've been hard at work on RapidWeaver 4.2.3 fixing a few issues that users have been encountering, a copy of this month's MacFormat dropped through the letterbox at Realmac HQ. In the June 2009 edition of the magazine (available now at a newsagent near you) there's a group test of OS X website creation apps. RapidWeaver was up against stiff competition in a test of 6 applications, but we were super-excited to discover that MacFormat crowned RapidWeaver the group test winner with this choice quote:
[RapidWeaver is] easy enough to use for a beginner, but offers great value in its scope for expansion.
We're absolutely thrilled to see RapidWeaver take the honours in a large group test, and to keep people weaving even more rapidly, we're also releasing RapidWeaver 4.2.3 today - an update that we strongly encourage all RapidWeaver 4.2.2 users to download. This update fixes a number of issues, including linking to blog posts and assets, as well as significant improvements in memory usage when saving files.
As always, you can grab the latest version of RapidWeaver from our Downloads page, or use RapidWeaver's 'Check for Updates' option to download the update.
Right Here. RightNahoo!
Over the weekend, some of the Realmac team (Dan, Nik, Danny and Keith) headed up to London for Yahoo's OpenHackLondon event. The idea is to show up on Saturday morning, learn about some Yahoo technologies and APIs (such as Maps, Flickr and Fire Eagle) and then spend 24 hours hacking on something related to the APIs which you then demo to a panel of judges on Sunday afternoon.
This was the first time that any of us attended a Hackday, however we're super pleased with our hack: a location-aware desktop application that uses a tonne of APIs to show information near you. One of our goals was to have our 'location browser' available as a download shortly after Hackday finished, so to accompany the release of an experimental build of the application, we've gone through the whole process of building RightYahoo, reflecting on our sleepless 24 hours of hacking to get the application written.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
It's been almost a year since we sat down to prototype the product now known as LittleSnapper, creating over 40 pages of wireframes for the application and spending countless hours ensuring that it looks, works, and behaves as you'd expect. We built the application because, at the time, we saw no product that had the features we ourselves wanted (DOM snapping, webpage-orientated organisation and full webpage capture in one beautiful application). We built LittleSnapper because we saw an opportunity to innovate.
The Mac developer community is known for its mutual respect for others work. Applications compete on their own unique features, and developers create applications that, whilst similar, serve the needs of a different set of users: take Pixelmator and Acorn, for example. That is, most developers.
In amongst a quick check of Twitter mentions for LittleSnapper, we discovered an app (let's call it Product X) that had seen a fairly notable update this week mentioned alongside LittleSnapper. Ever curious, we decided to see what was new and innovative in the updated Product X. We all downloaded the application here at Realmac HQ, installed it and were all astounded at the striking similarities between ‘Ours’ and ‘Theirs’.
Sidebar Inspector
Source Lists
Built-in Browsers and Element Snapping
Product Page Layout & Icons
A Little Perspective
We love competition - we thrive on it. The prospect of developers coming up with applications that are uniquely better than our own is something we're always wary of, and this possibility encourages us to make sure that our own releases are the best they humanly can be. But far-from-creative imitation, even as a sign of flattery, is not part of the community in which we're fortunate enough to be a member.
All of us at Realmac have been saddened by this episode. After many months of prototyping, designing, and refining the look and feel of LittleSnapper it's pained us to see such a liberal borrowing of our hard work. That said, we've got plenty of exciting tricks up our sleeves - and can't wait to see how others respond to our forthcoming updates!
About the Author: Nik is the Support and QA Manager here at Realmac Software.
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