I am a big fan of RapidWeaver, I use it for both MacSeven and my personal website. RapidWeaver (RW) allows to very quickly and easily build an entire website yet it is not a GUI design like iWeb. With RW you enter all of your information more in a form like environment, choose your theme, hit publish and presto it's done. There are GUI pages, and a great add-on called Blocks, but for blogging and photo type pages the stock RW style of entry is great and very efficient.

Ok, that was a 2 second reason why I like RW. Now for what bothered me this past week.

I have paid for RW, I think it was 3.2 when I bought it. A couple of days ago RW 3.6 came out and it has some really nice upgrades that I'm happy to see. It turns out that RW 3.6 is a $25 upgrade unless you have purchased 3.51 in which case it is a free upgrade. In general I don't like when there is a cost to upgrade unless it's a full version up grade, e.g.: 3.6 in my opinion should be a free upgrade from any 3.x version, and 4.0 should be a paid upgrade. You may or may not agree with my feeling on this, and that's fine - it's just my opinion. I actually paid the $25 to upgrade, I'm not thrilled about it, but I want to take advantage of the upgrades to I'm paying the price - after all in the scheme of things, $25 isn't too big of an amount to get me all worked up.

Here's what really bothers me about the $25 upgrade for RW 3.6. In recent months and weeks RealMacSoftware (makers of RW) have had RW on sale at places like MacUpdate Promo and MacZot, they have also given away a lot of free versions of 3.5. Then lo and behold it turns out to move up from 3.5 to 3.6 there is a $25 upgrade fee. Certainly somebody who got a free version of 3.5 can continue to use it, they are not forced to upgrade. But it smells sleazy to me to tempt people with discounted versions of 3.5 and even free versions to then tell them that they have to pay to upgrade to the next dot release.

I still like RW, I support the company, but I really question recent events / promotions of RW. I feel like they lured people in and then slapped them with an upgrade fee, and it doesn't sit well with me.




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