WiiWare is here, along with the Nintendo channel. Oh, and the Boston Apple Store is opening, the biggest in the US (It was gonna be bigger, but, umm, yeah, you'll have to watch to find out). Plus, a SNEAK PREVIEW of a new theme song! I also have some advice for Jerry Yang, and Steve Jobs. They're just gonna have to watch to find out what it is though, and so will you.
OMG OMG OMG! ITZ TTLY GOT BETTR WYSIWYG AND UPLAODERS AND MANAGERS AND A BETER INTRAFACE AND AJAXY GOODNESS IN EVERY BYTE!!!111!!!!eleven… *faints*
Err, sorry for that childish breakdown of purposeful misspellings, lolcat-esque grammar and misuse of capital letters, I just got a bit excited. This thing is 10000% better than Wordpress 2, and I mean it. I loved Wordpress 2 from the minute I started using it, but, sort of in the same way I love VectorDesigner, it bugged me in a lot of small-ish ways. The Wysiwyg editor messed with my posts, plugins had to be manually updated, the dashboard was almost entirely useless, and the interface would quickly become cluttered with the multitude of space-hogging plugins. Wordpress 2.5 fixes EVERYTHING that I hated about Wordpress 2, and then ads on top of it with some amazing features that I never knew I needed until now.
The new feature that I really like is the easy picture uploader, and inserter. You can use it for individual pictures or you can easily make really cool gallery pages and stuff (which I will demo later on). I think wordpress 2 had something like this, but it wasn’t anywhere near as smooth. This uses a lightbox style effect to put all of the dialogs and stuff into a neat and clean window. There are similar dialogs for video, audio, and other media (like embedded flash I presume). Lemme tell ya, these dialogs will save me SOOO much time I now don’t know what I would ever do without them, and this is the first post I’ve written in 2.5! So maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but they’re great, I can do more with my blog now that inserting stuff is seamless. I do have a few disappointments, for example you can’t grab a youtube link and have wordpress auto-insert the player for you (which would be really nice), but other than that it’s just really neat.
There are also a lot of little things that add to the overall experience of wordpress. The interface is much brighter, neater, and cleaner. Lists are better laid out and easier to read (like the Page Manager, pictured left), Tags auto-complete, categories sort by most used, little things like that. There are also some little new features that can add some more customizability to your blog, like the ability to edit the permalink of the post (notice the permalink for this post doesn’t have the FULL name of the post in it, to keep the URL short). Everything is much better laid out, and in general just looks better. I must say though, I was a bit shocked when I first logged into my new Wordpress, it is REALLY different from 2.0 in visual style, and things are laid out a bit differently, so there might be a tiny bit of a learning curve.
It’s not absolutely perfect though, it still has some (major) bugs, like, oh, not being able to add images when using Safari, but I’m sure they’ll get those sorted out. Overall: TOTALLY FRICKEN AMAZING! 463.58 Million thumbs up. Now, to demo the spiffy gallery feature:
People who follow me on twitter will know that sometimes I just go on and on about certain programs, like iMovie, Final Cut, Blender, and of course, VectorDesigner. I got it as part of the MacHeist bundle this January and have been using it quite a lot ever since. I make mockups mostly, plus shiny icons and avatars for my various projects. There are a lot of things I love about it and a lot of things I hate about it, and I was bored this morning, so I decided to write them down.
First of all, I don’t think this program was really intended for the kind of stuff I do with it. In a way it’s sort of a vector image editor (like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape) that thinks it’s a desktop publisher (like Swift Publisher or Printshop, or even Word). You can make icons and stuff with it, but most of it’s features are geared towards making things like posters. But yes, it’s still a vector editor, you can make shapes (either ‘regular’ ones like squares and circles, or custom ones), you can fill them with colors, pictures, and gradients. You can give them shadows and borders, and overlay text. You can make text wrap around shapes and follow lines. You can even give shapes different blend modes (like Add, Subtract, Difference, Soft Light, etc). Plus, as with most any vector editor, you can zoom in as far as you like and create small save files.
VectorDesigner seems to be heavily oriented towards photos, maybe for making scrapbooks, or posters, or invites. You can get pictures directly from your disk, your webcam, or through a really slick (yet pointlessly crippled, i’ll get to that later) Flickr image getter. You can then adjust the Exposure, Gamma, Saturation, Contrast, Bightness, Sharpness, and Sepia-ness of any image in a very iPhoto-esque way. While it’s image support is probably very useful to some people, I found it crippled and annoying. First of all, it INSISTS on always taking complete control of your webcam, even if you never open the picture taking window. As long as VectorDesigner is open, you can’t use your webcam. When I first saw the flickr feature I thought it would be really cool, I assumed you’d search for any flickr photo, then just drag it in. Not so. It has a pre-made database of a couple thousand photos organized into 10 categories, most of them pretty useless, like ‘Numbers’ and ‘Doors and Windows’ (No, I’m not kidding). What?!? Ok, seriously, if you’re going to cripple it that much don’t even call it a fricken flickr browser! It’s like clip art but less useful! Who’s idea was that and where they drunk when they came up with it? I’ve gotta be missing something here. There’s a color wheel button thing that appears to do nothing but clear the list so you can’t select anything. There’s a search box, but it only searches through the pictures in that category! The image adjust HUD is fine, but way to sensitive, move the exposure slider just a touch and your image will be completely washed out. All in all, the image features are an annoyance at best.
Overall, it isn’t bad, but it isn’t exactly good either. There are a lot of little annoyances with it, like you can’t change the size of the canvas to anything other than 8.5/11in (paper size), the printing ads borders to all of the objects, and you can’t specify an exact size in pixels for the export (unless you wanna do some math and figure out the dpi). But it works fine, can be quite powerful, and has a nice interface, so I live with it. As for my reccomendation: If you didn’t get it with MacHeist, it’s not worth it, I mean, $70, come on! I wouldn’t pay $70 if it were the most perfect vector editor around, and it’s far from that. If you did get it with MacHeist, go in there and play around, as I’ve found it can be quite fun and addicting, and you can end up making some great mockups.
As I’ve heard many people say, iMovie is not powerful enough, yet Final Cut is WAY overkill for most stuff, plus it’s interface is so complicated you have to gotta take a course to even learn how to split clips (No, I’m not kidding, I spent a week at a camp this year just to learn the basics of Final Cut). This is a BIG problem with iEye, I just don’t have time to struggle with Final Cut, yet with iMovie is just not powerful enough to do what I want. The solution: A middle ground, a consumer oriented program specifically designed to make video podcasts. Here’s a mockup I made in VectorDesigner:
It would have a multi-track timeline, just like Final Cut, so you could have multiple video/text/image tracks going on at once. You could drag and drop objects around, and animate them. You would organize clips by segment and take, instead of just by time taken (there could be an option to turn this off if you were working on a ‘freeform’ video). The interface would be polished and easy for anybody use.I’m busy with TiMo, which, while admittedly similar, would at this point be very difficult to turn into this. So, please, if any developers are reading this, have free time, and are up for a challenge, please make this. Thanks 
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