Recently, while poking around to find a more affordable alternative to Photoshop for Mac, I happened upon one of my greatest software finds to date: Pixelmator (Mac only). I really cannot say enough nice things about this software. PixelMator is not going to dethrone the king of photo manipulation any time soon, but this is no sophomorish, el-cheapo alternative. PixelMator is serious photo manipulation that has many of the features we all love about Photoshop and has on kick-ass user interface. Pixelmator also costs about one-tenth the price of Photoshop at just $59.00 US.

Pixelmator was founded in 2007 by London, UK brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide. Judging from the photos on their web site, the brothers are fairly young and so have a long and bright career ahead of them developing software. For more information or to purchase Pixelmator, visit their web site at www.pixelmator.com.

“SPAW Editor is a web based in-browser WYSIWYG editor control enabling web site developers to replace a standard textarea html control with full-featured, fully customizable, multilingual, skinable web based WYSIWYG editor. Version 2 adds tabbed multi-document interface, floating/shared toolbars, modular architecture and many other exciting features” — www.solmetra.com

Update – January 14, 2010

I have resumed work on the new version of SkyBlueCanvas. Due to the extent of the changes, the next version will be numbered 2.0. I have not set a release date yet but the major coding is complete. I am currently working with a UI designer to create a new interface for the software. I plan to begin testing in the next couple of weeks. Thank you for your patience.

I have just completed the coding for SkyBlueCanvas version 1.2. The new version is an important milestone for the lightweight CMS because it is the first version to fully implement i18n (internationalization) support, the MVC (model view controller) design pattern and a lightweight ACL (access control list) to support multiple users and access permissions.

Version 1.2 also introduces the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern into SkyBlueCanvas. While the MVC pattern is not fully implemented, this version does lay the groundwork for us to continue to refactor the code to fully implement the pattern.

Also new in version 1.2 is support for multiple users and user groups to control access to both front end and back end content. The new access control is a lightweight ACL (access control list) that allows the site admin to restrict which users can see what content and which admins can edit which types of content.

In addition to i18n support and beginning to implement the MVC pattern, version 1.2 also includes significant improvements to the code including a completely new Skin engine for building web pages and general cleanup to nearly every class. Even with the significant changes to a lot of the core underlying code, the new version will be almost 100% compatible with sites that are currently using version 1.1.

You can browse the source code of the new version at http://www.skybluecanvas.com/1.2-development

A word of caution: the new version is at stage alpha and has not been fully tested. Additionally, any add-ons available on our downloads page are not yet compatible with the new code.

What’s to come

SkyBlueCanvas will undergo very significant changes over the next several months. The changes will be implemented gradually and carefully to minimize the impact of upgrading from earlier versions of SkyBlueCanvas. The changes will focus on improving performance, usability and to simplify the API to make extending SkyBlueCanvas much easier.

I don’t normally make posts that are not related to SkyBlueCanvas, but I really enjoy seeing anyone do anything extremely well. As a friend of mine said, “Danny MacAskill is the Yo-Yo Ma of bikes”. This is just inspiring to watch. Watch the video, you won’t regret it.

It’s hard to believe that SkyBlueCanvas was released just 12 months ago. In many ways it seems like years have passed. In others, it seems like it could not possibly have been a year already.

We have accomplished a lot in our first year.

Over the past 12 months, SkyBlueCanvas has been downloaded about 20,000 times. That’s an average of 1,667 times per month or roughly 50 times per day. I would say that’s pretty good for the first year.

I am also happy to report that the skybluecanvas.com domain achieved Google PageRank 5 within the past couple of weeks. We are a long way from being a major node on the world wide web, but PR 5 means Google places a fair amount of “trust” in your site.

It has also been a pleasure and honor to meet and talk to a lot of the users who have discovered SkyBlueCanvas and have chosen it for their various web site projects. Frankly, it’s really cool and I get a rush out of it. I look forward to another great 12 months with your continued support.

Sincerely,
Scott Lewis
www.SkyBlueCanvas.com
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