There has been an incredible amount of hype circulating around the WordPress community during the past few weeks regarding the up-and-coming release of WordPress 2.7. 2.7 should most definitely take the cake for the most-hyped release of WordPress, thanks to the brand new administration panel that will be coming along with the new release–the first major administration panel redesign since… the end of last March.

Indeed, it hasn’t even been eight months yet since the release of WordPress 2.5, which came billed as having a radically newer, cleaner, and less cluttered administration panel and Dashboard. However, as I mentioned in my WordPress 2.5 review, its administration panel really wasn’t that different, other than having a newer theme that was much brighter on the eyes, compared to the blue colors of WP 2.0-2.3.

And so, apparently, the good folks at WordPress went back to the drawing board this summer to look at how to further improve the WordPress admin interface, but this time, they came up with a codename for the new project called Crazyhorse (though I don’t get what’s so crazy about making software better), and this time, they claimed to use lasers in their testing. Great. (Actually, they apparently talked all about it at a WordCamp SF 2008 session that I missed because I had to leave early.) And since then, the hype has been alive and well on the WordPress Development Blog. They’ve been doing surveys since September to get feedback on what the interface should be like, showing off videos and stuff about what the new Dashboard looks like, and for Pete’s sake, they’ve even announced each beta release of 2.7 on their development blog, something that they’ve never done before! (It might be smart if they put a warning in their beta release posts about some of the possible problems inherent with running a beta for those crazy people out there who upgrade and then find something screwing up…)

I have given the latest Beta 3 of WordPress 2.7 a try, on a separate testing installation. (All of my live blogs are still using 2.6 and I won’t be updating until 2.7 is final.) While I am going to save a complete review until after it goes final and I’ve had a chance to give it a try on my REAL blogs, I will say that the new layout is quite impressive once you start to figure it out–the transition takes awhile to adjust to. The navigation has fundamentally changed (gone are the “Write”/”Manage” verbs that used to be part of the navigation and in their place are nouns like “Posts”, “Pages”, “Media”, and “Links”), and there’s a lot more AJAX inserted into useful spots. Many of the screens are now a lot easier to rearrange and customize to your liking, and satisfy a number of qualms about things that I felt should have been in WordPress 2.5. There are a couple of unexpected glitches that randomly pop-up, particularly in the drop-down navigation menus, so it is going to take awhile for me to fully adapt. But then again, it took me awhile to fully adapt to WordPress 2.5 as well, but I did.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the eventual release of WordPress 2.7, which will definitely help make WordPress a more attractive option for bloggers and content creators. Quite frankly, I think it would serve it more justice to make it WordPress 3.0, but I don’t really have much say in that now, do I?

Tags: 2.7, administration, Automattic, beta, Blogging, Crazyhorse, Dashboard, interface, preview, release, WordPress

Preview, Mac OS X’s PDF/image viewer, has always been kind of an iffy subject and its fate has been uncertain. When Panther was released, Preview was hailed as the fastest PDF reader on the market, but it still was a bit clunky, and for me, personally, the relatively recent release of Adobe Reader 8 persuaded me to make that my default PDF reader.

However, Preview in Mac OS X Leopard has been greatly enhanced with a significant number of new and enhanced features which really define it as a serious PDF reader, and also brings a few tricks up its sleeve that formerly have only been available to PDF consumers after the purchase of Adobe Acrobat Pro. So what’s new? Let’s take a look.
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Tags: editing, features, images, iWork, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, PDFs, preview, review, viewing

On Apple’s 300+ Leopard Features List, iChat earns the recognition of having the most new features in the list–24 to be exact. Although iChat 4 includes a nice series of new features for the AV crowd and some other new ideas, is the new iChat any better at just plain, old-fashioned text chatting? I spent a couple of weeks with iChat to find out.
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Tags: Adium, AIM, audio, chat, Chax, collaboration, features, Google Talk, iChat, iChat Theater, Jabber, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, preview, Quick Look, recording, review, Screen Sharing, sharing, text, Video

It’s probably unreasonable for me to be so conceited as to think that my blog serieses (what’s the plural of “series”?) are spectator sports, but if there was speculation around this Leopard Feature Presentation, I bet that the odds would be pretty good that I would review Quick Look, well, rather quickly. A simple feature it may be, and it may make some people wonder about the purpose of it, but indeed, it is a handy new feature that opens up a glimpse to powerful potential.
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Tags: features, innovation, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, potential, preview, Quick Look, review, simple