Safari 4 - Browser Wars Heating Up?

First off, I'm not an Apply fanboi. Apple makes some great products, but as with anything they have their role and their demographic they appeal to. I've played with Safari on Windows and Safari on Mac and I've always felt it was lackluster and believed that Firefox was a hands down better browser.

That being said... I've been playing with the Safari 4 beta and it's *awesome*. It's fast, they use native text rendering now so the text doesn't look like garbage and like I said it's actually an awesome browser now.

I hope to get in some more time with it, but first impressions are that they've really done a good job of fixing Safari's major flaws. The browser wars are heating up and it seems that security and performance are the current battleground which is definitely a win for users.

-Stephen

Guild Launch v 5.4 Upcoming Changes

We have been hard at work here at Guild Launch on some major changes coming in what is, for now, called Version 5.4 of Guild Launch. These changes include:

Translation of Signification Portions of Guild Launch

1. Full translation of forum text into Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spansih
2. Translation of the login and header bar into Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish
3. Additions to allow Guild admins to select the guilds default language.
4. Additions to allow a user to select their personal preferred language.
5. After this release we will be trying to translate one section of the site per release until we have everything translated. Our focus is on translating the areas that users encounter first and most often which is why we focused on the login bar and the forums for this release.

Upgrades to the Guild Launch Profiler for WoW

1. The profiler has had some lingering bugs fixed
2. The character profiles on the site have been significantly upgraded and include much more of the information and stata that users want to see.
3. Achievement info is now tracked

Guild Achievement Tracker

1. This new feature will allow you to track your guild member's achievements with the profiler and to view who has completed which achievements.
2. Achievements can be marked as being "Tracked"
3. Tracked achievements can be shown in a widget

A new Look for the Main Guild Launch Site

1. The main Guild Launch site was designed more than 2 years ago and while we loved it then we felt it needed a remake.
2. The new version has a more modern feel and Vicki has put a lot of hard work into making it look awesome.

A new Signature Generator

1. We'll be releasing a new Signature generator to limited beta with this release.
2. This new signature generator has updated stats and updated graphics and is just slicker overall
3. The new site will also have some other new features for guilds to use... we'll announce those later. :)

Guild Launch Raid Tracking

In late December we took over development of DKPMon. We've spent a good deal of time in January integrating DKPmon into the ecology of our WoW Raid Tracking mods. In this release we will have major upgrades, including:

1. A new Raid Tracker "DKPmon Logging" mode. This mode will turn the raid tracker into a logger for DKPmon events. This mode allows you to use DKPmon to track DKP for boss kills and item awards and to have those events tracked in the raid tracker. They can then be imported into the site with no reentry of the data. This sounds small, but it's ABSOLUTELY HUGE.
2. The Raid Tracker has had UI enhancements including more menu options and the abiltity to create events with name and DKP value of your choosing via an "/rt addevent" command. This is huge too because it will cut down on editing of events for everyone who tracks various events throughout the raid such as wipes, attendances, attempts, etc.

Much more....

1. UI enhancements
2. Admin enhancements
3. Signup Enhancements
4. Character creation enhancements
5. more!

We have more to go in this release. It's going to be a large release, with a ton of enhancements and much more than just the highlights that I've mentioned here. The timeframe for this release is currently mid February.

Enjoy!
Stephen