If you're not already hooked by Mark Pilgrim's series, you're definitely missing something. I was... but no longer :-)

The activeRenderer beta team currently is 23 members strong, and sending me great feedback. You're welcome to join, just send me a note .

Here are the modifications in the latest beta release, taking into account the feedback of version 1.0 beta 6:

1. The tool's name and current version are now displayed in the sidebar of your local weblog home page, in the Status Center section.
2. Clicking on the activeRenderer Tool link in there takes you to the tool's preferences page. You can still access the same page from the Radio application, using the Tools / activeRenderer / Preferences... menu.
3. The Publish weblog outline style preference is now split in two, to accomodate bloggers who do not use titles in their posts (even though I think they should - Heads, decks, and leads, remember ?)
4. I've clarified the Preferences page by using some outline features, to get the whole picture, expand all the "active" nodes.
5. The Prefs page links to an online activeHelp. I'm a great believer in clear online documentation, and I've noticed a good deal of confusion among beta testers about activeRenderer's set of features. So here's a first try at making things simpler. The Help page is also accessible from Radio, though the Tools / activeRenderer / Help... menu.
6. I've included an optimized version of the opmlRender macro in activeRenderer. It can be inserted in your weblog's home template to manage parts of the home page - sidebars, blogrolls, etc. - as separate outline files.

activeRenderer beta 8 will include the code to access the tools registration service set up by Paolo and his eVectors crew.

Beta 9 will fine tune the tool update code, and add update logging in Radio's events log.

activeRenderer 1.0 should be out shortly after that, once I've got the feedback from beta 9.

Here are the latest statistics from a survey I found on ZDNet:

If you had to choose among Windows XP, Mac OS X, and some form of Linux for every day computing tasks, which one would you choose?

• Mac OS X 5869 (42%)
• Some flavor of Linux 4359 (31%)
• Windows XP 3879 (27%)

The number of answers does not make the survey totally insignificant, but if I relate those results to the way most of my clients are equiped, or what I know of current worldwide market shares, the survey tells more about ZDNet readership than anything else.

Anyway, if the tekky/geeky crowds are moving towards OS X, maybe it's a sign that Apple Computer is about to make a breakthrough in corporate environments.

Ok, it's a rather large maybe :-)