Aaron Brazell, co-author of the 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.0, has posted a similar article about the 2.1 release of WordPress.

Tomorrow, WordPress 2.1 will be released and it signifies the first major release since the 2.0 branch was launched. As is typical of major releases, they do not only address security/bugfixes but they release new functionality.

So in the spirit of the original article, I give you ten things you should know about WordPress 2.1.

It’s an extensive article, going into great detail about all the major changes & enhancements that are in the new release.  Looking forward to this release. The image uploads handling improvements will be worth the upgrade alone. I’ve found the popup menu on images has been the single most confusing part of the admin interface for users. Anything that will simplify this it a plus.

Great news, Tom Werner has announced that the new incarnation Gravatar will be released next month:

The wait for Gravatar 2.0 is almost over. The new site will be released in early February with an all new interface and some great new functionality.

He’s started a blog on the Gravatar site to keep us all updated on the progress. Thanks Tom!

Oh and for those who had a What the? moment with the heading of this post, Gravatar = Globally Recognized Avatar. It’s what provides the images next to people’s comments on this blog (if they’ve set one up) using ZenPax’s Gravatars2 plugin.

The Paint.NET developers have put up the first release candidate build for the 3.0 release. This is a great application for image editing.  It’s fast & reliable.  And while it may not have all the super-professional features of Photoshop (eg. Pantone colours), it’s plenty powerful enough for the average home user and I’ve found it to be more than enough for web & application development work. The previous 2.x releases were good, but they were lacking.  Most notably they lacked a multi-document interface, ie. having more than one file open at a time.  The 3.0 releases have added this, along with a swag of other features.

• More intuitive and more powerful toolbar
• User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel)
• Gradient drawing
• “Merge Down” layer command
• New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen

It also handles layers, with blending options and opacity. There’s a whole bunch of image effects with on-the-fly previewing. It also has my favourite feature: unlimited undos!  It’s also open source, released under the MIT licence.  The 3.0 releases also have built-in support for eight different languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil) & Spanish.

There’s an active forum community for answering questions and reporing bugs.  That forum also has a bunch of plugins to download.

The only downside (for some people at least) is that it needs the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and at least Windows XP (SP2).  Prior to 3.0 it did run on Windows 2000, but support for that was dropped with the 3.0 betas.  Works on 2003 & Vista.

This  application has become an absolutely integral part of my freelance development work, and we even have it installed as part of our standard developer image at my day job. 

This post is part of the O’Reilly Windows Developer Tools Day, celebrating the tools that make Windows developers lives easier.

Google Maps now has an Australian domain: maps.google.com.au. It’s the same site as maps.google.com, except it starts with the satellite view of Australia & you don’t need to put Australia in the search query when looking up Australian addresses. For example, if I was searching for Penrith in New South Wales, in Google Maps Australia I just have to search for Penrith, where as the regular Google Maps doesn’t find it, unless I add NSW Australia.

One other thing I noticed, while Google Maps is a fully fledged graduate of the Labs, Google Maps Australia is still in beta:

I’m hoping that this means, with the release of this domain, that business directory listings like what they have for the US & the UK aren’t too far off.

I’ve written up an open search plugin (a.k.a. Firefox search engine), which you can grab from the Mycroft site.

[via Google Maps Mania]

Any Film You Can Imagine
Originally uploaded by _Jer_.

I love public art that interacts with its environment, especially with a sense of humour - this is an amazingly realistic video of a crowd of tourists in Berlin!

I’m not sure who’s put this up, whether it’s an ad for Google Video or just an artwork, but either way it’s great. If someone can actually find a Google Video of this, that would be truly Zen.

[via Googlified, who also posted the real live Google Maps icon]

The carrier said that the plan would see an 8Mbps ADSL service offered to around 250,000 homes and businesses that currently only have access to satellite based internet service, expanding its terrestrial broadband coverage from 91 per cent to 95 per cent of the population.

“This ADSL broadband rollout would mean that even remote outback towns would for the first time be able to enjoy all of the social and economic benefits that come from being connected to high speed broadband,” Telstra Country Wide group managing director Geoff Booth said.

Australian IT: Pollies get broadband push

This is a great idea, the communications infrastructure in the bush is pretty bad. Reliable phone connections are rare, never mind the internet.  There doesn’t seem to be any time frame attached to this plan mentioned in the article, but if it was going to happen, it should be soon.

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