Background Textures

November 29th, 2009

Background textures are now available on the background tab.  They add a very nice touch to the look of the web designs.

Currently there are only 5 textures to choose from.  We’ll be adding many more in the future.  Also, the background textures will be a premium feature, requiring a paid account.  But for now they are free to use.

Background gradients don’t look right when shown with a background texture, but that will hopefully be fixed soon.

Texture On!

Ajax System Rework

November 19th, 2009

Today we released a new version of Rush Tide that has practically no obvious new features.  It does however contain a complete rewrite of our Ajax system.  Ajax is the technology that the browser uses to communicate with the web server while editing a design.

This new system is about 10x as fast for seeing your changes appear.  In certain cases you can now see your changes in as little as 30ms.

More importantly though, the new Ajax system will allow us to make some big improvements to our color system.  The colors will soon be able to be edited and have their related colors automatically be updated.

Also, some critical bugs were fixed regarding IE layout and our server side crashes will be greatly reduced.

Love and Hope

Word Press Widgets, Dog Fooding

November 13th, 2009

Rust Tide now supports widgets when exporting to WordPress.  Those contain all the fancy block formatting on the sidebars, which is rather nice to have.

To use them you must use widgets.  The default sidebar system will be a bit ugly if you don’t turn on widgets.

The menus aren’t being produced under WordPress, but we should be able to get that working soon.

We’re also now officially dogfooding our own theme generator as this blog now uses a Rush Tide theme.

Stay Thirsty my Friends

Rush Tide Blog

November 11th, 2009

Welcome to the new Rush Tide blog.  We’re going to post updates about new features and improvements as we develop Rush Tide.

This blog currently has the default word press theme.  That will be changing soon as we get our word press export improved a bit, at which time we’ll start dog-fooding our own product.

Speaking of exports.  We’re planning on opening up the export system to anyone to develop their own export format, so in short time we may have exports available for every major CMS, blog and forum system.

Peace Out

Widget Header Colors Fixed and Disable Premium Options

November 5th, 2009

Today we added fixed the colors of the widget headers so they have proper contrast to their background.  There’s still much work to do with the color system that very high on our priority list.

We also added several new options so that you can fully customize the button padding and all the widget colors.

Also when you try to download a design that uses premium options you’ll be given the opportunity to turn those options in addition to having the option to upgrade your account.  This is just an effort to make the download system a smoother more user friendly experience.

Thank you all for trying out our service.

Header Logo Images

November 4th, 2009

We added the option to upload logo images to the service today.  This was a very wanted feature so we’re proud to offer it now.

The logos will take the place of the title text.

We’re also planning on adding additional options to customize the header background texture.