The final version of the 3.0 release is now available for download. It’s only been just over a week since the release candidate was made available, so it looks like everything was ok. If you’ve got an earlier version installed, open up Paint.NET and go to Help -> Check for updates and follow the prompts, otherwise grab the installer from the download page. Note this version requires at least Windows XP SP2, Windows 2003 or Vista & the .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed.

Just a reminder of the new features in 3.0:

• Simple and intuitive tab-based multi-document user interface
• Now available in 8 languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish
• Interactive Gradient Tool that makes it very easy to draw and then fine-tune placement and coloring of a gradient. (this is very cool, you can move the markers anywhere after placement to change the angle and distance of the gradient)
• User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel)
• New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen
• More intuitive and more powerful toolbar
• Generally improved and cleaner user interface
• History files are now compressed to save disk space, reduce disk activity, and improve performance.
• “Merge Down” layer command

Congratulations to Rick & his team, it’s a great product, worthy of support.

Since updating to WordPress 2.1 I’ve been keeping my eye on both of my current active plugins: Bible Verse of the Day & Feed Locations.  They both seem to be working fine (and I’ve heard no complaints yet from users) so I’ve added them to the compatibility list.

The rest of this post is a technical description of updates done to the Bible Verse of the Day plugin.  If you’re not a plugin developer or not interested, the short of it is that the 3.0 version plugin has been released with a bunch of updates and improvements.  This release requires WordPress 2.1 to work, so if you haven’t updated WordPress, don’t update this plugin.  If you have, grab the update here.  The zip file now contains 2 PHP files, extract both into your wp-plugins folder.

On to the tech stuff…

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The Windows Powershell Blog has posted a two page cheat sheet for Powershell that was put together by Ben Pearce.  It’s very handy, I’ve already printed this out & sent it to the rest of the development team at work.  It’s in Word 2007 format, which is a bit of a problem for most people as Office 2007’s only been out for a couple of weeks.  What, you mean you didn’t immediately rush out and buy it?! Bill will not be happy with you!

Anyway, I do have Office 2007, so I’ve done up a PDF version of the sheet. You can download it here (200kb). Alternatively a commenter on the Powershell blog has posted a Word 97-2003 document version.

Update: Jeffrey on the PowerShell blog has now posted a PDF version too (see comment below. Thanks Jeffrey!)

Just in case someone in Sydney hasn’t seen this yet, Google will be having a plane fly low over Sydney on Australia Day (Jan 26 for those at home) taking super-high resolution photos of people celebrating. There’s a map on that page showing the area that the plane will fly in and a nifty little click-and-drag marker that shows the approximate time that the plane will be flying overhead.  The x marks the spot shadow and bounce on drop is a particularly nice effect, does anyone know if that’s a standard Maps API function or something custom they’ve written?

Anyway, if you can make it into Sydney on Australia Day, do something for the camera, and once the images go live, leave a comment linking to where you were.

[via Simon, Mashup, Google Maps Mania & Google Operating System]

WordPress 2.1 has been released. There’s a heap of updates which I’m not going to re-list here, check out the post on the WordPress blog for the full list.

A couple of things stand out for me, as a developer, that will be really handy:

• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Pseudo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
• The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.

That first point I think will be a bigger change than people think.  It will, very simply, allow people to use WordPress to maintain an entire site, not just a blog within a site.  Deane over at Gadgetopia will probably find this interesting too. (Update: Told you!)

I’ll be upgrading in the next day or so & see what all the changes actually mean.  Unfortunately I haven’t had the time recently to check whether my plugins work with 2.1, but they’re fairly self-contained, so hopefully it should be ok.  Once I install Ella I’ll check them out and release any updates as needed.

Check out the official release post for the full list of updates, and check out Aaron Brazell’s 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 post that I mentioned yesterday for some more detailed information on some of the changes.

Lorelle VanFossen has a worthy dedication for February:

I love WordPress Plugins. And I love WordPress Plugin authors even more.

Their jobs aren’t easy. They pull their hair out (and turn some parts gray) building their WordPress Plugins, then are assaulted by bug reports and users begging them to fix their Plugins because “we love them and we need them and can’t run our blogs without them”, all for no money nor return on their investment. Their days are spent responding to comments about the Plugin, often to users who can’t follow the most basic instructions, and chasing down reports of problems in the WordPress Support Forums.

So, I’m dedicating February to WordPress Plugins and WordPress Plugin authors. I’ll be writing 30 posts about different WordPress Plugins and the art of the WordPress Plugin.

This won’t be the first time she’s blogged about plugins, at the bottom of that post there is a long list of articles she’s written about pluigns and how they can be used.  They’re all well worth a read for anyone with a WordPress blog, and the How to Write a Simple WordPress Plugin, WordPress Pluggable Functions and Plugins by Nadgouda & WordPress Hooks - All of Them posts link to particularly useful reference material for plugin developers.