To have fast and smooth operation with drag & drop, even when there are a lot of stacks on the page.
I would like to have a keyboard shortcut to move one or more selected stacks on the page, like “SHIFT + ARROW UP” to move the stack before the stack before it, and “SHIFT + ARROW DOWN” to move the stack after the stack after it.
I would like to see styles applied to stacks also in Partial editing mode.
As already happens for stacks, to be able to edit simultaneously attributes (Author, Tags, Subtitle) of multiple selected partials.
Makes me think of Big Dan Teague, the cyclops character from the film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.
1-I mention this because BigDan seems appropriate, as a cyclops has, by definition, limited vision.
2-the film version of Big Dan was a Bible salesman, ie, someone who presented himself as someone who could be trusted, but in the end, he was only there to steal the assets.
3-the film version of BigDan was also like ours, not caring about the brother/s and where they were.
Doesn’t seem like real Macintosh software after all, more like Bill Gates and Windows.
Janis seems to be doing doing fine handling a few basics.
But let me catch up a bit.
Stacks provides a mechanism to encrypt 3rd party stacks and sign some of the interactions between a stack and the developers update server.
Some developers use this, some don’t. Some use it just for security on the network connection, others use it just for encryption. It’s up to them.
5 years ago piracy of stacks was rampant by using the open info inside a stack. I felt that the piracy was preventing pro-stacks from flourishing on the platform. In order to combat this we adopted some simple measures and some more complex ones like encryption. I think it helped quite a bit.
I am not sure how Realmac intends to handle that. It would probably be a good question for them.
Also, did you know that I have an open feature & bug tracker? You can always post ideal like these right in there any time they occur to you. I can’t promise I’ll approve and build every one, but I’ll let you know why, when, and even how I intend to build it when I do.
Just go here and click on the New Issue button and let me know what you want – or what bugs you’ve found.
But I have a question for feature 3: if a partial is used on every page – and there are different styles on every page – which one should a partial use when you double-click it in the Library?
My point: because a partial can be used anywhere – it might be part of many different styles. I can pick one – but it might be more confusing than not in some use cases.
I think if I had my way, things like the Foundry stack or Site Styles in foundation wouldn’t be attached to specific pages, but attached to the project as a whole. Perhaps it would be best to show a partial in that context?
It’s interesting (to me at least – nerd alert 🤓) to try to think of all the use cases for partials. And what is common and uncommon and consider what it would mean to pull styles from other places and inject them into the partials context.
I think it would definitely improve things in a lot of places. And maybe a pragmatic approach to it like that. Or maybe a project-wide setting? There are a number of ways to go.
Anyway – it’s a bit off topic, so I probably won’t post further on this, but if you’d like to chat about it I’m always happy to. :-)
I answered this in email. The answer is: I don’t know yet.
I do know that Mojave is the oldest version of macOS that I’m considering. I’m waiting for a bit more feedback, and also to see, as the app progresses, how much will have to be modified to bring compatibility backward to Mojave and Catalina.
The one big thing that Mojave has going for it: My build server currently runs Mojave. Upgrading the build sever, Xcode, and the server scripts to move to Catalina or Big Sur would require quite a bit of work I don’t really have the time to do right now.
So the question is: which is more work, updating the build server or porting the Stacks UI back to Mojave?
I think I will at least try to support Mojave. But no promises as I’m not done yet – there may yet be challenges that make Mojave infeasible or simply a lot more work.
Right now I think it’s mostly just UI stuff. Windows and controls made some big changes in Big Sur. I’d like to show these fancy new things to Big Sur + users. That means building a second UI just for Mojave. The entire UI doesn’t have to change – but certainly the window and immediate splitviews that can extend through the window title-bar. these require using the modern splitview that was introduced in Big Sur.
But building backwards compatibility has always paid long term dividends in supporting lots of small business users stuck on older hardware or, like @SteveMouzon – need access to some pro CAD tools or similar that don’t work beyond an older version of macOS.
It’s always fun to build for the latest system. But I’ve never regretted the work I put in to supporting older macOS. I think you can probably tell I’ve made up my mind – it’s just a matter of seeing if I can really do it.
:-)
Social media support is an easy one.
But I hope in future versions that I can improve quite a bit on what you’ve been using. It seems like easy stuff.
FTP/SFTP/FTPS
RW has supported these three transfer protocols. In the way-back days of RW3 and RW4 it was important. Most hosts only have basic support for FTP and the secure variants were rare. Which one would eventually win out was unknown.
But 10-15 years later it’s quite a different picture. SFTP is the winner. It’s far and away the fastest and uses the SSH system – so security folks love it.
Stacks will only support this standard. I want to actively and strongly discourage the other, much slower, and much less secure variants.
I always tell users, “If your host doesn’t support SFTP. It’s time to change hosts.” It really is that simple.
If you really really want to use those other protocols, then I’ll ask you to export to files and use a dedicated FTP app to do the dirty work.
I should also note that I’m piecing together some bits from other apps and projects I’ve worked on. My little FTP app (Deploy – never released) is/was swift based. Integrating Swift into an Objective-C codebase generally slows compiles by 5x to 10x. I’m trying to move quickly and that hit to productivity would really hurt. Building big apps in Swift still seems – not very swift. LOL.
I suppose I would adapt. But since plug-ins used to require Obj-C – I’m just going to stick with it for now. This requires a bit of rewrite of a few classes. I will save this work for after the first beta release.
So if the beta doesn’t have FTP – please know it’s coming. I’m just “swiftly converting to obj-c” 😝
@isaiah you are making everyone’s dreams come true. Since your doing so much and we talked about this years ago I’ll ask and then add it to the issues link you provided above.
Can you please add the ability to edit the html5 Element level. I need control over things like header nav main article aside section footer etc. for me to take Stacks into the commercial world. (Near 100% Accessibility is required in the market I serve.)
See this list as at times I need access to many of these also. The Element is the basic form of semantic and accessible html.
I wish you all the best and many more productive years in good health. But should you get hit by a chunk of Chinese rocket debris (it doesn’t always have to be a bus, now, does it?), would that be the end of Stacks or do you have this covered?
That’s a bit under the belt isn’t it? RW has a key dependency on Dan or whoever runs RM these days, as I’m not sure anymore.
Every product really has a single dependency on 1 person being at the heart of the business and in a SW business, that person writes the code. Isaiah has an enviable record of continuing to support software and also, not to kill off Apps when their support becomes too much or they fail.
Contrast that with my personal experience of buying many RM Apps that have all been pulled, withdrawn or don’t work anymore.
You do however, highlight a good point. To build a “half decent website” today, you would need both RW and Stacks which has 2 key dependancies - RW & Stacks. When we drop RW and switch to Stacks App, that dependency will be reduced down to just 1 dependency. So our exposure is reduced by 50%. It really is win win win.
Could it be your obsession with RW and Dan is affecting your reading skills? You sure seem to read stuff between the lines that exists only in your mind.
@mark You can do this at a stacks level and is built into Source. Many Source stacks can set a a tag from a short list and the lightweight Coder stack can be used to add any of thefull range of available tags, to any stack.
@isaiah Has there been a serious attempt to have a mediator solving the conflict with Dan?
There will be only one winner in this conflict and this is Wordpress. Although it is a developers nightmare, it will become a lot harder to justify not using it when there are two small unknown competitors instead of one which might have the chance to get known a bit outside the developers community.
Concerning nowadays web development the old saying reads „Nobody ever got fired because he used Wordpress.”
@Prodrive Hard to know what will happen. Sure, I can easily see WordPress being the “winner”. What RW and Stacks need to do independently is create a wonderful-to-use kick-ass app. Will either one do it? It doesn’t matter much to speculate … we’ll see how it turns out.
If worse comes to worse for customers … WordPress is improving by leaps and bounds. Folks thought that when WordPress introduced Gutenburg blocks that it would take WP at least 3 years (probably more) to be equivalent to using something like Elementor or one of the other add-on builders. In 2 years WP now offers full-site editing and a slew of folks have entered into the WP-world to create custom blocks or sets of custom blocks. WP is getting easier and easier to use, and more kick-assy.
I’ll continue to use Stacks5 if it’s a good app. But once you learn how WP “thinks” and get used to working with Local or MAMP it simply offers features that Stacks or RW never will.
I hope Stacks 5 works out well. But realistically it seems there’s way too much acrimony and skullduggery for RW and Stacks to get married again.
I get what you are saying completely, I originally used RW and I think it might have been Blocks back then I used, it was before mobile responsive times but then moved to WP. Used WP extensively for quite some time with builder plugins, but got very frustrated with it due to my use of Hype and SVG. Switched to RW again about three years ago and haven’t looked back. Hype fits in just lovely to Stacks pages with vertical height always causing problems in WP, but stacks just gets it when content is natively embedded with everything responsively resizing. The same goes for SVG, not just static SVG but quite complex animation scenes and interactive SVGs. Wordpress was/is an absolute pig to work with, with both of these forms of content Hype and/or SVG. It is as though you have to set defined heights that switch in WP, whereas Stacks pages will scale height proportionally without fuss. The other thing that WP was a nightmare for was the plugin conflicts, one plugin would automatically update and then knockout functionality of another resulting in frustrated customers phoning saying “My website is broken”. The beauty of Stacks pages I have found is that if they work on day of publish they are kind of rock solid and give no further grief. The only aspect that gripes me with RW/Stacks is that WP has become a defacto standard and customers now expect to be able to update content themselves (fair enough though), I use Armadillo, which is great but there are a number of extra things I would like it to do or other Stack elements be able to do, or at least me get more familiar with doing possibly and that is enabling a more customisable layout and feature set such as image layouts, galleries etc that the customer can work with themselves. Total CMS may be able to do that, but I like to work with I buy a plugin/stack once and then deploy it as and when needed either for a little or a lot of use within a website. More stacks that enable web interface editing is something I’m more than happy to wait for as I know they are on there way, I’m looking forward to the next Armadillo update, always checking for news. Either way, I do think Stacks beats WP hands down for the core of what I use, was a breath of frsh air rediscovering the RW (well… Stacks to be fair) ecosystem.
I think some would like to frame this as a “disagreement”.
It isn’t.
I don’t think I disagree with Realmac.
Realmac is acting.
I’m reacting.
In specific:
Realmac says they will include a Stacks-like page for free with RapidWeaver
Realmac says they will use the Stacks API without permission
Realmac has said that they can bypass Stacks encryption
These aren’t disagreements.
These are things that Realmac says they’ll do, or things they can do.
I agree. They will probably do these things.
I asked them not to (a lot). I think I got a little traction with #3.
But #1 and #2 seem to be proceeding.
My thoughts on these actions:
i can’t compete with free
using my API is legal but seems unethical to me
encryption was put in place to protect developer copyrights
Competing against a similar but free page is pretty much game-over. I don’t see any way to earn a living building plug-ins for RapidWeaver anymore. If I want to continue to develop Stacks I think it will need to be on a different platform.
I initially thought just to look at other plug-in platforms, but many of the stack developers have come together and encouraged me to build an app around Stacks and directly compete with RW and Elements.
Encouraged
And I’d really like to stress the word “encouraged” here. I felt pretty knocked down by this news from Realmac and thought a lot about giving up software development and going back to engineering (I used to design micro chips before Stacks became popular). But some very kind friends like Joe, Adam, Gary (doobox), and Janis really picked me up and got me back at my keyboard to build Stacks5.app
One month after these reactions…
We’ve made commitments to users and developers to build Stacks5.app. A month on, with a significant chunk of the app built, I feel more confident about Stacks everyday. And what Realmac does or doesn’t do is quickly becoming unimportant.
@isaiah A simple “no” would have answered my question. I think, it’s worth at least to try some kind of mediation to solve the conflict. If this attempt fails you and Dan may go ahead your paths to a division which will make both of you a lot weaker and will split a community in half.
Put off the “developer” glasses, most people in this forum are wearing and look at it from a client angle. What the hack is RapidWeaver? I don’t know it and please use something I know to do my site. This will not getting better if the answer is Stacks 5.
