RapidWeaver 4: Overhauled for Leopard

As you may remember me saying at the beginning of my review of Flux, I am a big fan of the WYSIWYG concept (What You See Is What You Get). It was RapidWeaver that originally introduced me to the concept, back when I received a license as part of the original MacHeist bundle.

Since v3.6 (the last version, reviewed by myself on MacApper), RapidWeaver has undergone a major Leopard overhaul (as a free upgrade) to improve on everything from interface to publishing.

The first major upgrade to RapidWeaver was it’s interface. As I said in the introduction, it has been completely overhauled, and re-thoughtout. You will now find a toolbar at the top of the RapidWeaver window with access to all of the most-used actions. This includes things like adding a page, publishing, and page info/setup. The Edit window also has a format bar at the bottom with quick access to things like bolding text, aligning, adding lists, and links.

The next section of RapidWeaver that got an overhaul was the option panes. The Site Setup floating pane was dropped in favor of a drop down pane, and also now includes a spot for you to add a Google Analytics tracking code. The Page Inspector has been cleaned up, and the buttons have now been super-sized for easy navigation. For each page there are 4 panes that always stay the same (General, Sidebar, Header and Styles), and the last button is where you can change options specific to each page’s type.

The Media Inspector now has it’s own button in the toolbar. The Media Inspector lets you do basic image edits like adding a border, rotating, cropping, filename, dimensions and adding an alt tag. The Snippets window now has a button in the toolbar and now sports a look similar to the To-Do list application Anxiety.

In terms of publishing RapidWeaver has went through some big changes. When you click the “Publish” button, you can choose to publish via FTP or .Mac, and also more advanced options like SFTP. When you have filled out your information, clicking publish will have your files scroll past the screen in a coverflow-esque view as they are uploaded. When the upload is finished, RapidWeaver plays the same chime iTunes does when it is finished burning a disc, and if you have Growl installed, you will receive a notification. The next time you make changes, you just have to click the Publish button and your changes will be published. You no longer have to go through the publishing setup window again to publish changes.

RapidWeaver save files can now be quick-looked in the Finder, so you can see a full preview of your site without having to open RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver also has a full manual, so learning to use all of RapidWeaver’s features is now no longer a guessing game.

For the most part, this update was mostly interface updates, and implementation of some Leopard technologies. RapidWeaver makes it very easy to get a website up and running, even if you don’t even know what HTML stands for. If you have a license to RapidWeaver 3.6, this is a free upgrade for you. If you own 3.5 or earlier, this upgrade is $30. You can purchase a new license for $59 from Realmac Software’s store for a limited time, and when this offer expires, licenses will run for $79.