Nine days ago I announced that I was running the beta of 1.6 to test it out. This morning I’m happy to announce that 1.6 is now publicly available.  Among the many cool new features that I know people will love is a tidied up Control Panel, hidden templates, and a pages module.  Also notice the new theme.  Sexy indeed!

Of course, as always, the upgrade is free if you own a license.

In a recent chat with Lisa and Nevin we were trading funny stories along the lines of “can you believe I was asked $odd_request” and so forth.  This made me remember an interesting story involving the illegal pirating of CodeIgniter.

The request was made through my site contact form from a Hotmail address, so clearly they were at least aware of my site, and might even be regular readers?  It might even be you!

In case you missed the news from any one of a thousand different news outlets, fan sites or blogs… Apple has released their Safari browser for Windows.  Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone on Windows would care, but I’m glad to see it released.  Apple has a cache that most companies don’t have, so heck, anything that makes people aware that they are using a browser is good as far as I’m concerned - I still get surprised by people who have not even heard of Firefox before.  Mind you, these are usually the same people who, when asked if they’ve heard of Netscape, nod absently.  I guess its nice that developers on Windows can test out their work without buying a Mac (or begging me for more screenshots… you know who you are!).

Even now that I’m on a Mac, I find myself going to Firefox at least 90% of the time.  In truth, I can’t live without Firebug or the Web Developer extension.  Heck, even colorzilla has a special place in my heart!  So now I start the process of hoping that Apple makes it as good on Windows as it is on a Mac.

As a sidenote, the Safari page is beautiful.  Check out the “12 reasons you’ll love Safari” list on the bottom.  Brilliant use of Scriptaculous if I do say so. Note to self… steal that idea….

Found an interesting article on Apple’s website.  It seems they recommend you calibrate your Mac’s battery.  I’m giving it a shot right now, although I can’t imagine I’ll notice a difference… makes me wish I had read that before I’ve been on this thing for 8 hours a day.

Also read that your Mac does not want to be “optimized” by which they basically mean defragmented.  Fun times.

Oh yes, and cool kids keep their docks on the left (or right… currently its left ;) ).

The beautiful wallpaper is courtesy of Wolfgang Bartelme .  In fact, he even makes the Photoshop source available.  If you’re interested, he has a short tutorial on how he made it available as well.

Exciting things are happening inside EllisLab. We're internally testing ExpressionEngine 1.6 (in fact DerekAllard.com is running off it right now), and judging by how smoothly everything has gone so far, things should be ready for public use very soon!

If you use EE to handle "client sites" there are a couple of new features that you're going to love. Your job just became easier friends! Rick will cut off my use of the corporate jet if I say any more... so you'll need to trust me on that one. That said, these are significant enough that I'm going to delay 2 projects that I have "in the chutes" right now, just so that I can use 1.6 on them. The long term benefits make the small delay worth it.

And let me also say this: Its a tribute to how we handle beta software that the only bug I've found in the whole application so far is a hyperlink that was missing a dot. Way to go Paul and Derek - rockin the kazbar as usual.

Beta and bleeding-edge software has become something of a joke in “web 2.0”.  I think Paul summed it up nicely when he said he loved you.  But “beta” does serve a really important role - to allow interested users to advance test software that they love.  In a world where so few organizations “get it”, I was grateful to see that Mozilla understands.

First sign of brilliance - the “beta” or test version of Firefox 3 is called “Minefield”.  And the logo is equally great.

Nothing says “things just might go wrong, use at your own caution” like an image of the world represented like one of those exploding balls from the old Looneytunes cartoons.

So the gist of this post boils down to me asking “why”.  Presumably you’re using Wordpress to blog.  If you are using it as a pseudo-cms, then you already feel the pain.  What if there was a blogging platform that was superior to Wordpress in security and functionality, and also would give you expertise in a framework that could double as a full-fledged Content-Management-System that you could use commercially with your clients/customers, and was tightly integrated with CodeIgniter… would you be interested?

Then why aren’t you using ExpressionEngine?

Rick Ellis (The “Ellis” in Ellislab and all around grand pu-ba) recently announced what has been widely speculated in the community for a long time, that ExpressionEngine is getting integrated very tightly with CodeIgniter.  This leaves me with the aching question: As a CodeIgniter programmer, what does Wordpress offer you?  Many of us (CI programmers I mean) keep a personal blog where we discuss CodeIgniter and related developments.  When deciding on a blogging platform, there are several good options, but it seems that there are 2 common choices; (1) roll it yourself (this is how I started) or (2) use Wordpress.  I’d like to argue right now for a third, and better, option - use ExpressionEngine.

Courtesy of lifehacker comes this brilliant Firefox tip.

If you’ve ever tried copying and pasting a multi-line address into Google Maps just to realize that an input box will only take one line at a time—meaning that you have to copy and paste each line individually—there’s a simple Firefox tweak that will solve this problem:

Type “about:config” in the location bar. In the “Filter” field type “singleline.”
You can set the value to 2 for editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines, which will allow pasting of multiple lines to input boxes.