RapidWeaver 4 coming soon

Ars.technica recently wrote a very promising preview of Realmac Software’s RapidWeaver application, a graphical Web page editing program. I spent a fair amount of time using Rapidweaver 3. It's pretty good, but not quite there yet because of some major annoyances . RapidWeaver 4 looks like it’s gonna up the ante with some great improvements. It'll be out for beta testing within the next month or so. Realmac hasn't released an official launch date yet.

RapidWeaver is a very visually-oriented, drag-and-drop sort of Web page creation program. Who is it for? Well, it’s more advanced than iWeb, but not as advanced as Dreamweaver, if that helps. It has much more of a focus on blogging than any other development app I’ve tried; indeed, its site templates are based around the assumption that blog posts will be the meat on your site’s dinner table.

Of course you can “go under the hood” if you want and do the real HTML geek stuff, but mainly it’s for quickly and easily creating, maintaining, and uploading template-based sites.

The templates are nice, too, and there are plenty of Realmac as well as third party theme packs you can purchase. And there are almost 400 "Add-ons" which supposedly let you easily drag-and-drop more advancd features into your site. Haven't tried those. A lot of Mac software developers use RapidWeaver templates on their own sites.

It’s not available for download yet, but when it is I’ll give it a try and let you know. I'd hold off buying RapidWeaver 3 unless they offer a substantial discount on version 4.

YouSendIt - Alternative to FTP

If you frequently need to send large files to others, check out YouSendIt sometime. It's kinda like FTP, but not really. 

Through their service, you upload a file and enter your recipient email address. The recipient gets a notice with a handy link for downloading the file. They click and download, everybody's happy - and nobody's email bombs-out because of attachment size problems.  And nobody needs to know what "FTP software" is or how to use it.

The free version lets you move up to 100 megs at a time. As you go up in price, you can send larger and larger files. Oh, and you can also assign expiration dates for files, and brand a page on YouSendIt with your own company information. 

It's a pretty slick system, and gets around all the confusion and complication often present with FTP solutions.