While all the sales have been running over the past couple weeks I’ve had time to hide away and scour Stacks for ways to improve memory efficiency. We’ve nailed down a number of leaks, both big and small and managed to fix a few other small and rare bugs along the way. It’s not a big update, but sometimes that last 1% is the most important.
It’s a free update. If Stacks hasn’t already offered to download it for you, then you can go to the Stacks page and download it there.
Today Stacks will be the MacUpdate sale item of the day. So you can head on over to get Stacks at a whopping 50% off!
We’ve gone a bit crazy we’re going to offer everything else in our store for 25% off too for one day only! You can get Stacks at 50% off, plus all our other plugins, Simple Stacks, and even Kiwi for 25% off. Just enter BigSummerSale into the coupon code of the YourHead Store.
This offer doesn’t last long, and we rarely ever have sales like this. Tomorrow, when our sanity returns, the sale will be gone, so grab what you need while you can.
This is a one day only sale. It’s only valid on August 3rd. No exceptions. No extensions. No take-backs. No whining the day after. On the 4th we’ll be back to business as usual. Really. We’re serious. I mean it. For reals.
We’re updating Kiwi to version 1.2.3 today. The update is to include the OAuth Echo support for image posting that will be required in a few weeks when Twitter starts to turn of Basic Auth.
The supported image posting services have changed, too. We’ve added support for TwitrPix and TwitGoo, but had to drop Posterous and yFrog; TwitPic support continues to be supported.
For more details on OAuth Echo, what it is and what it means, you can see a longer post on my personal blog.
Our MacUpdate user reviews are holding steady at 5 stars for our new Stacks 1.3 release.
Thanks to everyone that has added a review!
Yeah! We’re releasing Stacks 1.3 today!
Download: Stacks 1.3.0
More Info: About Stacks
And just between you and me, this release is a really big deal. There are some really great new features in Stacks 1.3 and best of all… it’s a totally free upgrade!
HUD stands for Heads Up Display
We’ve made some simple changes to the Stack Info HUD. It’s the part of Stacks that you probably use more than any other, so we wanted to make sure that it was really easy to use.
- New layout to show off custom controls.
- New behaviors like remembering where it was and animating custom controls.
- New features like custom stack help and custom stack info.
- New info like the custom stack version number.
Behind the Scenes
A lot of the power of Stacks isn’t built in; it’s what 3rd party developers have added on. Stacks 1.3 introduces a brand new Stacks API. Stacks API 2 introduces tons of new templates, new ways to build Javascript powered stacks, and lots of ways to make custom stacks easier to use. We’ve taken lots of time to ensure that stack developers can smoothly upgrade their new stacks, too. Here’s some of the great new features:
- Automatic Sparkle update
- Double-click to install
- Integrated jQuery and MooTools
- Repeating elements
- Improved asset use
And there’s lots, lots more too. It’s all documented in the new Stacks API documents. And if you need more help, please come join the Stacks Developers Group. We’re always talking about the latest API goodies.
There is One More Thing — Simple Stacks
We couldn’t help but take advantage of all the new Stacks API 2 features. We wanted to show off. We’re launching a few add-on stacks of our own. Our Simple Stacks are a great way to build some complex layouts without knowing HTML or resorting to too many nested stacks. Build lists, columns, or grids of many items. Then go ahead and get creative with your content; it’s stacks — so add columns to your lists or drop a grid of items into a three column stack. Get creative!
More Info and Live Demos: Simple Stacks
Simple Columns
Simple Columns lets you build lots of little fixed sized columns or cells that “float” into your layout. It’s a great way of creating a grid of products, or just a few columns that are exactly sized and spaced. When your layout gets wider, more columns float in, when it gets narrower the extra columns wrap around to create a grid.
Simple Lists
Simple lists let you build numbered or bulleted lists simply and easily. No need to write HTML or built them up from a ton of stacks. Just drop them in and select the number of items in your list. Simple Lists will pick up the CSS from your theme but let you override the font sizes and list margins.
Simple Definitions
A definition is a special kind of list. It’s a list with the content completely indented into its own column. A great looking layout that used to be only for pro-coders. Our Simple Definitions stack lets you easily build definition lists, edit the layout and font sizes, and drop in whatever sort of content you like.
When we upgraded Collage a while back it had a couple of small bugs that crept in along with all the new features. Today were releasing Collage to squish those last couple bugs.
What Changed
Mac OS 10.5
Two of these bugs only affect Mac OS X 10.5 users. Hopefully there are fewer and fewer folks using Mac OS X 10.5. But if you’re one of the few that still has to use that OS, then you can again drop more than one image or folder into Collage.
Lightbox Display
We’ve also corrected how the lightbox displays right after opening for the first time. If the page was scrolled the image would appear for a moment out of place.
And a couple other cosmetic items in the user interface, too.
Get It
Auto Update
If you’re already using Collage regularly and have RapidWeaver automatic updates enabled then you should see the update the next time you edit a Collage page.
Download
You can always download the latest version on the Collage page.
New Site
The new site is live. There’s a new theme, a new homepage, a bit of new content, and lots of new links. Even this blog you’re reading is all new.
I’ve tried to make the content a bit more succinct and keep the design of the site a bit more consistent. And I’ve redone the whole theme using HTML5, Javascript, and a lot of CSS3.
CSS3 is amazing!
The CSS3 theme is pretty fancy, but the entire site has only a handful of images. Most of which are the product logos and screenshots.
The gradients, shadows, colors, and text is all styled using CSS. This means things look slightly different depending on your browser. The site definitely looks best in newish WebKit based browsers like Safari, Chrome, and iOS. It looks roughly the same in recent versions of FireFox, too. It will look a bit blander on older versions, of course.
I get very little traffic from Internet Explorer. It’s no surprise, really. For those forced to use IE my site will work well in IE8, albeit a bit more plainly. In IE7 it’s plainer still, yet remains quite functional.
Stragglers
But YourHead no longer works in IE6. It looks quite bad, actually. I no longer employ the “PNG Fix” to correct for opacity and there are some box model problems I didn’t bother to correct. The good news is that only about 5% of my visitors use IE. And only about 10% of those use IE6 anymore.
I promised I’d drop IE6 the day it no longer represented 1% of the visitors; that day is today. Stragglers: it’s time to upgrade. IT managers: you’re standing in the way of prgress. Step aside. We’re coming through whether you like it or not.
And the Plugins?
No, I’m not dropping IE6 support for my plugins. Not everyone is selling Mac software. So most folks still have considerably more than 1% of their visitors from IE6. I’ll still work hard to make sure things continue to render well until that day comes.
I’m working on building a new theme for YourHead.com. It’s still in the works, but you can see a preview of it posted on my ember page.
I’m starting a new blog for YourHead. The changeover in commenting systems inside RapidWeaver seemed like a good place to make a clean break. I’m going to try something new too, I’m going to write this blog in Tumblr. I’m not yet sure what method I’ll use to link and/or publish it back to my main site. I’ll probably do a bit of experimenting.
