Another day, another build of everyone’s favourite web design tool!
Make sure you back up any mission-critical projects before using them with this version, and yes, you can run this alongside other versions of RapidWeaver should you wish. If you find any issues please report them here in this thread.
What’s New in 8.1 Beta 6 (Build 20356b)?
Added a new drop down menu to the Simulator toolbar button making it easier to open new simulator windows
Added iPhone XS Max to the simulator window
Fixed a bunch more Dark Mode issues
Fixed a crash when converting RW7 documents
Fixed some issues with the sizing in the simulator
Various other fixes and improvements
What’s New in 8.1?
Dark Mode for Mojave now supported
Added Amazon S3 as a Publishing Destination
Added support back in for copying a resources URL
Added a new drop down menu to the Simulator toolbar button
Added iPhone XS Max to the simulator window
Multiple selection is now supported in the Resources Browser
Resources can now be dragged from a child folder to the root resources folder
Source list layout is now restored between opens
Files in the Resources Browser can now be renamed
Fixed an issue where the sitemap plugin and sitemap.xml was displayed and exported incorrectly
Fixed an issue with adding edited photos from the resources browser
Fixed an issue with resources not getting exported when previewing
Fixed an issue where RapidWeaver would appear to deadlock while opening projects
Fixed an issue where RapidWeaver would re-publish all files on every publish
Fixed an issue where RapidWeaver would get stuck looping between pages
Fixed an issue where the incorrect path would be used for social tags in the page header
Fixed an issue with multiple buy buttons showing
Removed the javascript that was removing line breaks from the Offroad theme
Fixed an issue where banner images wouldn’t show due to an issue with CSS consolidation
Fixed a naming issue with FontAwesome
Show Properties button in Blog now works correctly
Fixed an issue with page styles being incorrectly applied to Master Styles
Fixed up an issue with the Addons Installer
Fixed up various crashes in the Photo Album Plugin
Fixed a crash when using “Reveal in Finder” and the resource cannot be found
Fixed up crash when using the link panel
Fixed a crash that would sometimes occur in the Snippets Window
Numerous other fixes and enhancements to boring (or too secret to mention yet)
[DEV] Added a method to plugins to mark a page as changed without reloading the preview #2781
I’ve got quite a complex project so I’ll be very much in the minority but having tried the latest 8.1 beta today for an hour or so, I can confirm that the looping problem is not fixed.
A shame as it was my only real problem with RW8.
@jamesbond I’m not sure if you’re aware but if you open a simulator window and set the device to custom, you can resize the window freely just like the old preview. Is there a reason this doesn’t work for you?
Essentially, the ability to quickly change the width of the preview window WITHIN the RW environment is a really quick way to preview breakpoints and their effects on a page’s layout, as I said in my last reply there:
Thank you @tpbradley but as pointed out above there are a whole host of reasons why some people would like to have the ability to resize the preview returned. It’s not just a few people but many many users. While Simulator is lovely there are many would like the old feature returned after it was removed for no obvious reason. All we have had thus far on the matter is a cursory comment from Dan, he neither confirmed it will return or that it won’t, he just paid us some lip service, as appears to be his style. A definitive on the matter would be appreciated. Are RealMac going to listen to it’s users and return the feature?
@jamesbond Can we please dispense with the antagonistic comments, it doesn’t solve anything. In fact, when I read stuff like that it just pisses me off. Please also don’t say things like “many many users”. There’s no possible way you could have spoken to a significant portion of our user base. We don’t make decision based on who shouts the loudest.
Tom, go count the users who replied to the thread I linked to agreeing/asking for its return.
‘many many’ may have been an exaggeration but I think 1 ‘many’ is justified.
Thank you @tpbradley what pisses me off is when something gets pulled from something I use day in day out and the lead developer chooses to consistently sidestep the question of whether it’s going to be returned or not.
I speak to an awful lot of RapidWeaver users on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, this is a reoccurring theme.
I don’t expect a decision based on who is shouting or not, perhaps my voice is being raised simply because fter repeatedly asking the same question, I’m still without an answer.
So, one word, yes or no, if you please: Is the ability to resize the preview window going to be returned?
@PaulRussam I tried reading that thread and honestly it’s ridiculous. There’s accusations and hateful comments being thrown all over the place. It sounds like a bunch of teenage girls having a tantrum.
@jamesbond You have to understand that we can’t rely on other people’s market research. I can’t give you a definitive yes or no answer because a decision on this hasn’t been made yet.
We don’t remove features just to annoy people. The code in question was very old, hard to maintain and had started causing problems elsewhere in RW. There’s nothing vindictive going on here.
What’s actually helpful to us is when people describe their workflow when using a particular feature. Even better would be suggestions on how to improve the feature.
So I say again, please dispense with the antagonistic comments. Lets have something constructive that will help us decide on if/how to re-implement this feature.
@tpbradley
You’re quite right that thread had many unpleasant comments in it, It essentially went like this: Could we have preview width change back please
Use Simulator Simulator is good but it doesn’t do what we could do before
Use Simulator OK, I get it you like Simulator, I do too but it’s not as effective as Preview when developing
Use Simulator … its Great! Yes, as I said I like it but why remove a perfectly good feature as an upgrade
Use Simulator, here’s a guide in case you don’t know how to Why do you keep bringing it back to Preview vs Simulator? We’d just like the width change back
Use Simulator Here’s an example or 2 of how I use Preview
Use Simulator
etc etc etc ETC!
Whilst I appreciate you can’t give a definitive Yes or No could you at least let us know it’s being considered as I’ve tried several times to use 8 but I end up banging my head off the desk in frustration when I can’t simply test what I’m working on without having to open another window on my desktop that I have to flipflop to/from to view a simple change I make in a stack setting.
What I really don’t understand about that thread was the passion some users had for defending the deletion of a feature … weird
When I first raised this on this forum I asked Dan “is there a reason for it’s removal, and if not can it be put back”? Until today I have never had a straight forward reply.
Some months on and you have now explained why it was removed. Why that one sentence couldn’t have been offered at the start is anyones guess, it would certainly have prevented a lot of frustration on behalf on some users.
I don’t follow. How can we help you decide if and how it should be put back over and above what we’ve already done? If you have anything particular in mind please say so. If you need help with the code I’m sure there are many people willing to help.
@tpbradley on the subject of Simulator, why does it refresh and display the page your working on in edit?
If I am working on page X and display it in Simulator, and then flick to Page Y without telling Simulator to refresh, it will refresh regardless and display Page Y, which slows the entire editing process down.
If I have opted not to have Simulator autorefresh, it should only refresh when I click “refresh”, regardless of which page is in edit.
Version 8.1 (20356b)
Something strange happening with the simulator. I am limited to only one, or none at all.
EG
I click on simulate and a small window opens titled: (null) (infx)
I change this using the menu to iPhone 8 (for example).
I then try to ‘open a new simulator window’ and nothing happens. (My workflow with 8.0 was to have an iPad and an iPhone 8 open).
If I close the simulator window I am unable to open one. i.e. clicking on Simulate does nothing.
@Phi Sure ok. I’m just sick and tired of people having a go at us, throwing accusations around or making generalised assumptions about the user base. All this does is waste my time, and that directly impacts the number of features I can squeeze into the next release.
@jamesbond Maybe it’s just me but I always assume a feature is removed for good reason - just wouldn’t make sense otherwise. The simulator is designed to stay in sync with the content shown in the editor, the auto refresh option is for automatically refreshing the simulator on every change.
@PaulRussam That’s just one interpretation of the thread, I read it very differently. As I said in my previous comment, we are considering it.
@ricinport Thanks for reporting this, I’ll look into it
I’ll not be so trite as to quote the well-known phrase regarding assuming things, suffice to say I assume nothing and when i don’t understand something I ask questions. When I did question I got silence. When I pushed the question the first time I got ignored. When I pushed the question a second time, I got ignored. When I pushed it a third time I got a comment along the lines of “we’ll look into it”, which did nothing to answer my first question which was why was it removed?
You may feel I have no right to ask these questions and less of a right to an answer, but I feel differently.
Once again, I did neither. I asked a very reasonable question and got nothing in return. This entire saga for me could have been ended before it got started with an actual reply, as you offered yesterday. But no, I had to push and push and push to get it.
As for making assumptions, again, I didn’t. I simply did something perhaps Realmac didn’t do, which is to ask people outside the RealMac bubble their view on the removal of the preview feature. How many people did I ask? A large percentage of the user base? No, of course not. Did RealMac?
Obviously, I’m not looking for an answer to that last question, I’m merely making a point, which seems to be that RealMac are the ones making assumptions about their users, not I.
On that note, I shall depart this thread as it’s now going nowhere for me personally.
Dan, why did such troubles (difficulties) with the export of the site to a local folder?! Why not leave the old export option when you just select a folder and export? Now go into the options to make changes, then choose a folder and then export will work. This does not add to the program simplicity and convenience.
