Wednesday was a big day for us at Realmac HQ as we finally released RapidWeaver 5. This latest version of everyone's favourite website creation app has a tonne of new features and tweaks to make creating and maintaining a websites easier than ever.

There's the super-handy Resources feature that allows you to manage all the files in a single place, six absolutely stunning new themes that we've commissioned from world-renowned designers, HTML and XML sitemap generation - with the latter being automatically submitted to the search engines, theme consolidation to make your site far quicker to load, and much much more!

RapidWeaver 5 is a paid upgrade, however existing customers can give the demo a try and upgrade for just $39.

If you bought RapidWeaver 4 on or after 1st November 2010 we'll upgrade you to RapidWeaver 5 at no charge - just contact us via this special form and we'll sort it for you!

Happy Weaving!

On Wednesday evening Apple caught us off-guard by announcing that not only will Mac OS X Lion ship with a built-in Mac App Store, but that the App Store will also be available within 90 days to Mac OS X Snow Leopard customers. It's clearly an exciting time to be a Mac developer, with the new distribution platform offering great potential for easily reaching the ever-increasing Mac userbase.

Simply put: we're planning to have all our apps available on the Mac App Store at launch. That's not to say there's some niggles we'll have to work around, but with the App Store offering users the incredibly-hassle-free method of delivering software, we'd be crazy to not be there. The licensing setup of the App Store may not work for every edge-case out there, but for the majority of the Mac community it means that dealing with store systems, billing details, email confirmations, serial number registration and vastly different installation processes are a thing of the past. That can only be a good thing!

There's obviously some issues that we're going to have to work out: a couple of our apps will in the near future receive paid upgrades which simply aren't possible on the App Store, and the co-existence of our own store alongside Apple's (at least, for the time being) being just two that spring to mind.

Despite the integration issues that we're inevitably going to encounter adding (or maybe that should be moving) our apps to the App Store, we can't help but be optimistic about the store. Since the App Store launched two and a quarter years ago, Apple's interaction with the developer community has slowly changed: we're all finally on the same page with regards to approval guidelines, and Apple are willing to listen to developers offering feedback about those guidelines.

We're excited to see the Mac App Store launch in the coming months - a way that makes it ridiculously simple for users to buy the latest and greatest Mac apps - and will be working to ensure our apps are "Available on the App Store" from launch!

After quite the Apple Keynote last night - Mac App Store, Mac OS X Lion and iLife '11 - we were more than a little bit eager to get our hands on copies of the new version of iMovie. With the the new release offering some fun new Trailer features, we decided that the best way to test iMovie was to create a movie trailer about our trip to get iLife '11. With iMovie '11.

Without any further ado here's the video - shot on iPhone 4 and 3GSs - for your enjoyment.

Here at Realmac HQ we're all pretty stoked for Apple's 'Back to the Mac' event later today. Whilst iOS is garnering all the press, and the App Store gaining more traction than ever, it seems the rumours of Mac OS X's demise have been slightly exaggerated.

So what do we think we'll see at today's Apple event? We've been thinking about it at the office, and whilst we don't know any more than the rest of the world about Apple's Mac plans we thought it would be fun to share our predictions with you.

New MacBook Air

It's fair to say this is all-but-confirmed, but if you're wanting a touch-based Mac we think you'll be disappointed: if the Air is smaller than the current generation, that'll place it within spitting distance of the built-for-touch iPad.

New releases of iLife and iWork

The last refresh of iLife and iWork was back in January last year, and whilst we're not sure what'll be new in the releases, it's more than likely they'll both be updated today.

FaceTime in iChat

Given that iChat currently supports video conferencing, it's not a stretch to imagine Apple offering FaceTime in Mac OS X 10.7. The ability to video chat between iPhone / iPod touch and the Mac - not to mention the inevitable iPad with FaceTime - makes this a no-brainer.

Resolution Independence

Resolution independence has been in the works for Mac OS X since 10.4 'Tiger' launched in April 2005 and Apple's current developer documentation states "Resolution independence is still a developer-only feature in Mac OS X v10.5 and is not yet intended for end-user adoption". However the iPhone 4's Retina Display has reiterated the importance of resolution independence - and we'd be surprised if 10.7 doesn't bring complete resolution independence support to the Mac.

RIP, Aqua

There are only a few Aqua elements left in Mac OS X today, and we think that Apple will likely replace the blue contrast in the remaining controls with something slicker.

Mail / Address Book / iCal UI

The graphical style of the iPad's apps, combined with the slick style of the MobileMe web apps, makes us think that Apple will give the equivalent Mac apps a UI refresh too.

MapKit

MapKit - which powers almost all the maps in iOS apps including Apple's own - is the framework we'd most like to see added to the desktop from the touch OS. There are tonnes of uses for displaying maps and using the associated geo tools MapKit has to offer.

AirPlay

Apple's new protocol for streaming audio is due to appear on all iOS devices next month and we think AirPlay will make an appearance within QuickTime X alongside developers APIs for apps to use the technology.

Elastic scrolling / Pull to Refresh

Elastic scrolling is used in iOS to show a user has reached the end of a scrolling view (or that a view doesn't have anything out-of-current-sight to scroll to). On the desktop, the presence of scrollbars is used to display this as well as being a method of scrolling. As such we don't think Apple will move to an iOS-style scrollbar.

Mac OS X App Store

We're certain the idea of a Mac App Store has crossed Apple's minds during 10.7's development, but we'll be surprised if Apple announce one today.

Game Center

Apple built Game Center to provide users with a one-stop place to see how they're doing in games against their friends, however much like Ping it's also a trojan horse to sell more content (in this case, games from the App Store). With or without a Mac OS X App Store we don't think this is going to happen in 10.7.

Touch-based Macs Running 10.7

Mac OS X isn't really designed for touch, and if Apple were to launch larger-form-factor touch-based devices we really think iOS would be reworked for the hardware - instead of Apple trying to retrofit the latest desktop release for touch interaction.

MacBook Family Without Optical Drives

If our laptops are going to get any thinner, the optical drive will have to go. Some of the team think this won't happen until next year, so we're putting this as a wildcard.

iBooks.app

Apple would probably prefer people bought an iPad to read their iBooks, but we'd like to see a built-in app that allows you to read iBooks you've added to your iTunes library. One idea we discussed over lunch today was that Preview would get iBook-reading capabilities, but we'll see.

More iOS Frameworks in 10.7

Apple brought the iPhone's QuickTime implementation to the Mac as QuickTime X in Snow Leopard. With that in mind, we're throwing out a couple of wildcards to some iOS Frameworks that we'd like to see on the Mac: Media Player (API for accessing iTunes media) and the Asset Library (API for accessing iPhoto / Aperture media).

When?

We'd love to see a Developer Preview of 10.7 today, however we're settling on 'before WWDC 2011' for the Developer preview with a public release this time next year. iLife and the MacBook Air should, of course, be available in the near future though.

In the lead up to releasing Courier, we decided that we wanted to get people excited about our new addition by creating a short teaser video. We didn't want give away too much about the app, but at the same time we wanted to reveal some of its features and make the video fun, engaging and well… a little bit Realmac.

Courier's main UI is based on the metaphor of envelopes, stamps and deliveries. So rather than the standard screen-cast-style video of an application going through its motions, we thought that it would be really cool to make Courier come alive using the magic of stop motion. This way we could use some of the real-life elements of Courier to allude to its features without giving too much away.

So we had an idea of what we wanted to show and how we could incorporate everyday elements; such as cotton wool and red jelly beans - to give the video the light-hearted, 'DIY' aesthetic we were after (although to this day, I'm still not quite sure how the plastic horse got involved). The only real hurdle seemed to be that we had never made a stop motion video before!

Thankfully, we had the awesome iStopMotion by Boinx Software to assist us. This is a great app, and it really helped make the whole process a lot easier. Using iStopMotion we could simply set up a static camera and capture each frame as we moved everything slowly around the workspace. Dan and I were on a tight schedule and although we had done a lot of planning, I feared that we may not finish the shoot in time as big changes in light would be a real problem. However, this turned out not to be the case and we managed to finish filming after 6 continuous hours.

Not only did we use iStopMotion to film the teaser video itself, but we also set up a Mac in the corner of the 'Studio' (otherwise known as our meeting room) to record the whole process through the iSight using iStopMotion.

The results of this are almost as fun as the teaser video itself: