Beginning today, December 24, 2009 I’ll be out of the office for the holidays. Liz and I are going out of town Friday evening and will be gone for a while so I won’t be getting back to emails until we return January 5, 2010.

I did want to offer you all some goodies and tell you about some of what we have going on.

Kiwi
If you’ve not heard Isaiah, from YourHead Software, has recently released Kiwi, a brand-new twitter client. It is truly outstanding! I had the pleasure of working on it with him, designing graphics and UI elements and such, as well as themes for the app itself. I look forward to continuing my work with him on Kiwi as the app goes forward.

Kiwi Themes
In connection to Kiwi, Ollie Levy and myself are working on Kiwi Themes. It is a repository for themes for Isaiah’s twitter client. Currently We have 12 themes online and will have more after the new year. We’re also working on a system to allow users to upload their own themes to share with the world, and much more. So be sure to check that out at http://kiwithemes.com

Wallpaper
I’ve also put up some desktop wallpaper for Kiwi to help dress up your Mac.

Icons
While you’re on the Icon Lab check out out the Kiwi wallpaper be sure to have a look at our Unity icon set. It was released earlier this year and is great for site and application development. We’re offering a holiday discount for items at both Elixir and the Icon Lab at the bottom of this blog post.

Dashing
Speaking of recently released items — I recently put out a new RapidWeaver theme titled Dashing. It’s a great theme for designing a small business site, blog, personal site, portfolio and much more. It too is included in the holiday discount below, as well as our Ultimate Bundle which includes each and every theme we sell.

Holiday discount
You can use the discount code below during checkout to receive 25% off your entire purchase. The sale ends January 6, 2010 at noon (Eastern US time). The code for the discount is HOLIDAYFUN09. This code is good at both here at Elixir as well as at the Icon Lab.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful, and safe, holiday and we want you to know we have a lot of really exciting things planned for 2010!

Tags: Themes, Icons, Kiwi, Wallpaper

I am pretty excited to announce our latest theme. This one is really stylish and fun to use. It sort of came together without a lot of problems and was really fun to develop. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to our latest addition — Float. Below you’ll find a few of the main features of this new theme, but for a list of everything that Float offers, have a look at the product page.

Beautiful and fluffy
Float is a light, airy design that offers you a classy choice for designing your website. This RapidWeaver theme packs a lot of options. It is a theme that is perfect for creating a website for a small business, portfolio, blog, photo album and more.

Backgrounds & headers

Float offers a huge number professionally designed, stylish background styles. The backgrounds included in this theme serve as both a header and a site background. Included in Float are 27 graphical backgrounds along with the ability to use the color picker to choose your own solid color. Or, simply hide the background altogether. View the live preview site to get an idea of the high quality, background images and watch our demo video to see all of the included backgrounds. There are also 6 blank slots for use with RWmultitool.

Sidebar
Float includes seven sidebar variations. Not only can you place your sidebar on the left or the right, but you can also choose to locate it at the bottom of the site, just above the footer. In addition to normal sidebar styles you can choose to dress up the sidebar as well. We offer an option for a 3D inset look on either the left or the right, as well as a talk-bubble-esque look for the sidebar at the bottom. Check out our demo video or live preview site to get a look at all of these options.

Find it... in style
Float incorporates a very stylish search feature into its menu bar. When a visitor to your site clicks the magnifying glass located on the right-hand side of the menu bar a search field will float up and allow them to use Google to search your site.

Stylish navigation
One of the main highlights of the Float theme is its beautiful floating menu bar. It allows users to navigate your site in style. In setting up your site with RapidWeaver, and our Float theme, you have a wide variety of options available to you.

Float allows you to:
• Change the font style and size
• Modify the background of the selected items
• Change the division lines between menu items

Float offers four fonts to choose from in the menu. It also gives you the option of three font sizes.

When changing the current selected item's appearance you have eight different options.

We've also provided five different menu divider lines.

There’s a lot more to Float, so be sure to checkout the product page.

Tags: New Theme, Float, Themes

To celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday we wanted to offer up a large discount for everyone.

Beginning today and running through Saturday (ending at mid-night EST on Saturday) you can use the code BLACKFRIDAY to receive 40% off your entire order. The code works on orders of $15 or more and discounts the entire cart’s contents.

We truly are thankful for RapidWeaver, the Realmac crew, and especially you all, our wonderful customers.

We hope you have a wonderful, and safe, Thanksgiving holiday.

Update: I forgot to mention this before, but the discount code will also work on our sister site Icon lab.

Tags: Themes, Discounts, Black Friday

This week has seen something new from us each day. Today brings something free to all of our users...

Today — Today we're releasing our popular Cloud theme as a free download. Drop by Cloud's product page to get your free download today!

Thursday — Thursday saw the release of our latest RapidWeaver theme — Notebook. This new theme is a real looker. It brings a unique style to your website while remaining classy. It is packed with a ton of theme variations in order for you to customize it and give it your own feel.

Wednesday — We released our first sets of Collage 2 style packs. These stylish Collage 2 packages have been a real hit. They're a great way to dress up your Collage 2 page with just a couple of clicks.

Tuesday — We released a new set of wallpapers for your Mac and iPhone. Two words: Cosmically beautiful!

Monday — We updated our Vanilla theme to fix a small bug with the top sidebar and its background color option.

Tags: Themes, elixir, Free

Say hello to Notebook
I've been toiling away on this new RapidWeaver theme for a while now, and I am quite excited to show it off.

Our latest theme, titled Notebook, is a real looker. It brings a unique style to your website while remaining classy. It is packed with a ton of theme variations in order for you to customize it and give it your own feel.

This new theme is a great choice for anyone interested in designing a blog, personal website, small business site or portfolio.

Let's get acquainted with Notebook —

The basics
Here's a quick rundown of the Notebook theme's variations. More details are covered on the Notebook product page:

Theme Variations
• Header visibility
• Header styles
• Title and slogan visibility
• Background
• Sidebar tab color
• Blog archives visibility
• Sidebar visibility
• Site search visibility
• Logo settings
• Page title visibility
• Body font styles
• Sidebar font styles

Color Variations
The Notebook theme makes use of RapidWeaver's Color Picker, allowing you to easily change the appearance of your site with a couple clicks of the mouse. We also provide built-in color schemes. For more information, see the Notebook product page.

You can edit these parts of the theme with the color picker:
• Site Background
• Site title
• Site slogan
• Blog title
• Site links
• Menu bar
• Menu bar - hover
• Menu text
• Menu text - hover

This theme works exclusively with RapidWeaver 3.6 and above.

For more
Be sure to read all of the details regarding Notebook to see what it has to offer you.

Tags: Themes, elixir

We've had a couple of reports of the top sidebar option in the Vanilla theme being broken. There was in fact a small bug which prevented the background of the top sidebar from appearing as well as the option to change the color of the sidebar background.

We've updated the theme to fix this bug. We're giving you the option of how to update your theme.

You can either download the full version of the theme and replace your current version (instructions are included in the README file that comes with the full download). Full versions have been sent out via e-junkie for all Vanilla owners.

The second option is to use the update installer found here.

The updater installs ONLY the one file that needs to be updated (colors.css). This allows for any modifications you've made to other files to remain intact. It also saves you the trouble of reconfiguring your site after re-installing the full theme. Using the updater is the reccomended process.

Please note that your Vanilla theme must be located in the default themes location for this updater to work. RapidWeaver, by default, installs all themes here and would only be elsewhere if you purposefully moved it. If this is the case, move it back to the default location before running the updater.

This brings our Vanilla theme up to version 1.5.

If you have questions, please let us know here.

Tags: Themes, Updates

We do a lot of things here at elixir — Stock and custom RapidWeaver themes, icon and logo design, website development, and now even homework. OK, we don't do homework, but we help!

One of our customers e-mailed us the other day to ask a question. In his e-mail he also included this anecdote that made use smile. I asked him if we could share it with you all and he kindly obliged:

From Robert:

I bought one of your themes — Elements — the day I bought Rapidweaver. My 10 year old son announced he had a major project on space to deliver for school — "Just a written report, film or presentation" he said. He had done virtually nothing in three weeks and it needed to be in the next morning! Neither of us had ever designed a website in our lives, but after seeing your theme, I risked it, we downloaded RW and your theme, learned how to use it in an afternoon and completed the project on space shuttles as a website just a few hours later, thanks to you and the folks at RW. It really was a cinch to use even for a ten year old. My only disappointment was that he only got a B [on the project] — but at least it was better than the fail he would have been heading for with no project.

Reading this e-mail from Robert truly made me smile. I'm very happy that we could help out, without even knowing it. It also shows how quick anyone can pickup RapidWeaver and start learning it.

I'd not mentioned this to Robert yet, and wanted to wait until this blog post went up, but we've sent he and his son some other themes. Just in case he might have some other school projects to work on. ;-)

Tags: elixir, Themes

Whew, we have finished our updates in preparing for RapidWeaver 4.0's immanent arrival.

All of our themes have been upgraded, adding in, and updating, the few files that will bring them up to date for RapidWeaver 4.0.

All of our latest themes have already been shipped with the files needed and the rest fixed today or a couple of weeks ago when we sent out other updates.

The themes updated today all got updaters, which make it easier to do the upgrades. The updater only replaces the following files within your theme(s):

• Preview.Png
• Preview_Large.jpg
• Theme.Plist

All other files within the theme go untouched.

For the updater to work your themes must be located in the Library>Application Support>RapidWeaver folder located in your User folder. If you're unsure what this means, then you have probably not moved your themes or modified them. The updaters will only work with the theme installed. Without the theme it is useless.

Also, people have asked whether changes they have made themselves to their Theme.Plist file will get overwritten. Yes. This updater replaces that file. Be sure to back it up if necessary before running the updater.

Here are the updaters once again from today:

Cloud — Download Updater
Dark — Download Updater
Light — Download Updater
Organic — Download Updater
Origami — Download Updater
Paper — Download Updater
Plastic — Download Updater
Ribbon — Download Updater
Sprout — Download Updater
Toast — Download Updater

Again, all of our themes have been updated for 4.0 or shipped with the needed files at their release. So if your theme is not on this list, it is already ready for RW 4.0.

[Update]: Many have asked if the updated themes will work with RapidWeaver 3.6. Yes. The new and updated files provided by these updaters have no adverse affects on RapidWeaver 3.6.

Tags: Themes, elixir, Updates