RapidWeaver 4.1 update in the wild

Realmac Software has updated RapidWeaver, its powerful web design application, to version 4.1 with a handful of significant new features and the usual accompaniment of bug fixes.

At the top of RapidWeaver 4.1's list is a feature that was on 4.0's menu, but was pulled for various issues until now: Quick Look support. Now, users should be able to press the space bar when any RapidWeaver 4.x file is highlighted in the Finder to see a live preview of it. This should save quite a bit of time for anyone using RapidWeaver to manage multiple sites, or especially in a commercial environment.

Quick Look is working properly now, but you have to toggle a new preference for RapidWeaver to begin saving Quick Look previews in site files, which will slow down the saving process. Simply opening a project, then re-saving without making any changes generated Quick Look previews for us, and the additional time during the saving process for a couple of site files with 5-10 pages of content was negligible.

For RapidWeaver users who include pictures in blog posts or across a site, a new preference for automatically resizing photos to a specific pixel width should also save time.

Another major enhancement for MobileMe users is "significantly improved and simplified" MobileMe publishing. RapidWeaver 4.1 can now publish to web.me.com directories in addition to the old 'n' busted homepage.mac.com area, which means that RapidWeaver sites can finally power MobileMe sites with the Personal Domain option enabled, with neither fuss nor muss.

Plenty of other enhancements arrived in RW 4.1, including a progress bar when loading projects, better memory usage when exporting large blogs, HTML previews in list view in the snippet window, Realmac's iMedia Browser running on PowerPC Macs, blog summaries instead of a brief portion of the main entry in RSS feeds, and much more.

RapidWeaver 4.1 is a free upgrade for owners of 4.0 and 3.6, and should be available via 4.0's built-in update mechanism.