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Radio UserLand 8.0. For the past few months I've been using beta releases of Radio as my principal weblog reading and authoring tools. UserLand is about to ship Radio with a single-user price of $39.95. The company made a last-minute decision to call it 8.0 as opposed to 7.1, and there's no question it's a major revision. The product is great.
I recently installed Radio for a client to use as an intranet/collaboration tool, and I realized how difficult it is to explain what Radio really is. There's so much behind the curtain because it's based on UserLand's older Frontier and Manila content management products. In some ways there's more functionality in Radio than in Manila that costs $899. For instance, Radio includes a complete desktop server and a fully-automated content publishing system. I even got sucked into Radio's awesome development environment and built my own add-on Tool called news2mail. (It's the first real code I've written in at least five years.)
The beta process was fascinating. The developers (and there aren't many of them) were extremely responsive to feedback from the testers. It wasn't at all unusual to suggest an improvement at 2am and download the enhancment an hour later. That's due in no small part to Radio's automated update capability. Although they had to stop adding goodies to ship 8.0, the product will continue to improve continuously.
I won't attempt to further describe here what Radio does. Rather, I suggest you download the 30-day free trial. Even if you don't keep it, you'll learn how far the world of weblogs and RSS have come, and you'll get an idea of where they're going. [Discuss]
Posted Wednesday, January 09, 2002 8:41:15 PM 
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