Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

The clever bit is the search page.

Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

Link: Archaeopix

To return to the release of Sandvox, I have had a brief play with it, and if you’re a Mac user and run a small website you must give it a go. This is the closest piece of web design software to WYSIWYG nirvana that I have seen. It uses Apple’s editable WebKit, and CoreImage, to great effect – no ‘blind’ preview pages with cumbersome preview stages, but pure in-place editing. The supplied templates contain some elegant designs as well as some awful ones – but that’s just down to personal taste.

Bear in mind that this is a beta, and there are no instructions bar a basic introduction, but do go ahead and download it. Give them your support!

Wikitosh has information of varying quality. One fantastic example is the section on Apple’s industrial design – “Jonathan Ive RULES at industrial Design!!” – is the sole entry. For some reason they have some odd conventions. Software is named SoftWare. Hardware is HardWare. I don’t like that one bit. Wikitosh has a long way to go before it becomes a mature source of information – and that, of course, is up to (literate) people contributing to and self-moderating it.

The second Mac Wiki is Mac Guides, which was recently set up by Mac Rumors, the popular Mac news and rumours website. Rather than being over-ambitious, Mac Guides aims to “provide an organized outlet for the vast amounts of knowledge that are provided in the forums“. That means tutorials, solutions to common problems etc. This could help with the problem of repetition, and useful information becoming buried in their burgeoning (but extremely useful) forums.

Keep your eyes on both – and remember to contribute something useful to help build a resource which benfits all Mac users.

Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, macguides, osx, guides, wiki, wikitosh

I installed it on my PowerBook this afternoon, and all was fine, except once major issue. The update had deleted my monitor calibration files. I was stuck with the message “The factory profile for the display could not be found” when I tried to recalibrate, and everything was horribly bright, washed out, with a purple cast.

I restarted (cue sharp intake of breath) twice, and it seemed to then magically reincarnate my monitor profiles, and all is well again.

So – moral of the day for people experiencing odd behaviour on their Macs after installing the OSX 10.4.3 update – restart. If that doesn’t work, restart again…

Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, osx, 10.3.4

I first looked at it some time ago (I think it was at version 2.x) and was deeply unimpressed – it lacked style, usability, and was too limiting for websites beyond a basic “Hello World” personal website. Version 3.1 arrived, and, well, what a change. RapidWeaver, once you get used to the semi-WYSIWYG editor (you can’t see any of your site navigation or design in the editor, only basic text styling), and discover the page inspector, you’ve actually got a lovely website creation tool.

RapidWeaver really isn’t software you would use to design a site from scratch, with your own design, but if you would like to make an elegant site based on well designed templates, then RapidWeaver is a good choice. It’s worth noting that you are able to customise the supplied themes if you have the know-how (which is fortunate for me, as I do – if you don’t you’ll have to use the templates as-is).

Whilst using RapidWeaver 3.1 I did wish that images were handled more efficiently. It’s terribly clunky, and images do not align in the editor, which is frustrating. But as soon as I made this silent prayer (well, in reality, loud curse), Realmac software announced a beta of 3.2, accompanied by a fancy video showing off what it can do.

RapidWeaver 3.2 uses Apple’s CoreImage technologies to resize and rotate images, all in the RW interface – at last! But, sadly, it is still no closer to being WYSIWYG.

To align an image on the left, you need to drag in your image from the Finder, and just double-click it to change its size or rotate it. If you want to align it left or right, you still have to dig into: Format>HTML>Align Image Left – surely there can be something to do this in the media inspector?!

Here’s my image as it should appear, and does when I preview my page:

But when you’re actually editing your content, you see:

Whilst it’s not too hard to cope with, when you’re working on large pages with lots of images, it becomes annoying that things don’t match up, and you have to flick between two tabs to see what you’re doing is correct.

The lack of WYSIWYG features is certainly my main gripe. And while I’m at it, it seems that every page must have its own folder, into which are copied all of the navigation, CSS etc! Whilst this isn’t so crucial for smaller websites, it will begin to get very unwieldy if you begin to get adventurous (not to mention webspace). I hope that they fix this!

I’ve been fairly negative so far, but really I do feel very positive about RapidWeaver. It has been an absolute godsend for me, with all of the micro-sites I have to produce. A quick modification to some select templates, and I’m away. Media galleries are a snip (drag, drop, describe).

Once you bend your head round the RapidWeaver way of doing things, or in my case, untrain your mind from the Dreamweaver method, you really have an elegant piece of software that produces great looking websites, with excellent browser compatibility (and code that validates!). Go and have a look for yourself, and don’t forget to watch the video about RapidWeaver 3.2 at the foot of the page!

It just needs a little refinement in the editor

It will be interesting to see how Karelia approach WYSIWYG in Sandvox, which is coming nearer to a public beta…

Technorati Tags: webdesign, rapidweaver, wysiwyg

Check back soon for my review.

Technorati Tags: ecto, blogging, wysiwyg

Although the app has yet to ship, and the only screenshot is half-covered with sand (!), it has great potential by my book. I’m slowly getting fed up with overly complex applications, when I want to focus on content (in terms of web publishing).

The Karelia homepage has been designed using Sandvox, and a quick look at the code shows it to be XHTML Transitional, but a quick check on validator.w3.org shows that it doesn’t yet produce valid code. To be fair, it is plainly stated that Sandvox is still in the alpha stage, and it will be beta tested, so they should be able to iron out minor bugs before release.

I have had a look at RapidWeaver, but I found that it was far too limiting in many ways, and not very efficient (every page has to go in a new directory, with copies of the navigation images). There wasn’t any image resizing, and rich text was a bit awkward. I played about with the demo for a few hours, and didn’t get a good feel out of it. I’ll watch Sandvox closely – they are after all the same people who produced Watson, a well respected program in its day, and they have a deep understanding of how Mac programs should work.

If you own a Mac running Tiger, keep your eye on this one!

Technorati Tags: wysiwyg, sandvox, osx

At about 6.30pm GMT, Steve Jobs announced on stage at WWDC that the rumours were true. Apple were moving the Mac platform to Intel CPUs, beginning now. A brave move.

Technorati Tags: apple, intel, osx, powerpc

When I first heard the news, I wasn’t sure what to think. My first thought was “Oh that’s a shame” since I felt that the PowerPC was a fantastic CPU, and Intel is so ubiquitous in the PC world it’s nice to use something completely different. But then, it’s not the CPU that makes the Mac, it’s the GUI – Mac OSX. I think at the moment, no matter how many benchmarks I look at, that the processors are just as good as each other. I’ve heard some bad things about the Intel Macs that are shortly shipping to Apple developers, in that benchmarks show them to be much slower than the current top-end Macs. Whilst I admit initial disappointment, there’s a whole year to go before they start shipping Intel Macs, and I’m sure they’ll get some monster of a machine designed by then. Get some working systems out to developers, so they can get recompiling ‘fat binaries’ i.e. versions of their software that will run on both PowerPC and Intel-based CPUs.

What a minefield though. What will it do to Apple’s sales? Nobody, unless they need a new Mac now is going to buy anything new that has PowerPC architecture. It’ll be out of date in a year’s time. There will never be a G5 PowerBook (not that I’m moaning since I use a G4 PowerBook and it’s fine for everything I throw at it). New versions of software come 2006 will come in a variety of flavours. Some will be fat-binaries, some will be Intel-only, others PowerPC only. At least Xcode 2.1 on Tiger will allow software developers to compile for both, but if you don’t own both systems, how will you test your software? Steve Jobs says there are some ‘great’ PowerPC products yet to be announced, but who will buy them..?

Lots of questions. It’s going to be an interesting one to watch…

[UPDATE]

John Siracusa of ars technica has written a great article about the ‘switch’ to Intel…

RapidMetaBlog supports categories, essential functionality if you like to keep a tight structure on your blog. When writing your post, you have to use HTML, but for simple jottings, it’s very handy indeed. All you need is paragraph tags (remember to close them!), and perhaps an href here and there. You can’t insert images at this time (unless they’re already online, and you know the URI), but then this is supposed to be a widget, not a full-featured weblog editor like Ecto or MarsEdit.

I’ll post some screenshots later.

You can download RapidMetaBlog from Nigel’s blog or from Dashboard Widgets.

Here are some screenshots:

The widget, as seen when you first open your Dashboard

Clicking the plus sign slides open this pane, where you type your posting in XHTML. Clicking the ‘circle’ icon slides open a preview pane on the right.

Minimalism

Dashboard widgets should be minimalist, or at least make really good use of space. I’ve seen quite a few widgets that want to behave like fully functioning programs, and they end up taking over your Dashboard by default, hogging resources, and generally looking ugly. RapidMetaBlog is great, since it ingeniously gets around the space problem (you need space for your post, and ideally if it’s going to be seen by the world, you need to see what it’s going to look like before you publish it) with its expandable panes.

If you’re a blogger, and you run OSX 10.4 Tiger, get this widget!

I’m not American! I demand that it’s update to include us Brits too!