Likes and dislikes so far:

Likes:
  • Instant pleasure factor on trying out.
  • Affordability—RapidWeaver only costs $49, and the various plugins rarely cost more than a tenner, often less. The Accordion plugin, for instance, is a whopping £5.38. That doesn't sound like a lot of money to someone like me who, although poor, would hate to have to download the free open source software and make it work.
  • Quality of templates—for this sort of money, the templates are really very good.
  • Ease of use and quality of results for day-to-day work, even without code.
  • Terrific (almost unlimited) expandability with code.
  • Cocoa goodness - Apple colour picker, Font menu, smart guides etc. and everything that comes with Cocoa and Apple OS 'built-ins'.
  • Ability to enter raw HTML inline in the 'Edit' window and have it rendered normally along with the normal content when previewed. Like Freeway's Markup Items, I guess, except you can type it straight in along with your content on the page.
  • Ability to enter raw HTML in most, if not all, the text fields in the Inspector so that, for instance, you could style your email link in the footer, which can only be set by using a small text field in the Page Inspector, rather like the fields in the Freeway Inspector. Yet you can write HTML in there, and it will render correctly, and you only see the result. For instance, the site at http://www.woodmill-farm.co.uk has Google Analytics code pasted into the 'copyright' field at the bottom, because they said it should go in the footer. It works, and is invisible. Interestingly, when I typed that addres above in just now, I automatically enclosed it in greater-than and lesser-than brackets, and RapidWeaver didn't render it on the page, because it thought it was code. If it had been code, RapidWeaver would have executed it, without showing it.
  • Templates guaranteed (as much as that is possible) to be fully compliant and, from what I've read, kind to the disabled too.

Dislikes:
  • General clunkiness—setting margins around inline pictures is probably easy enough with CSS but nowhere near as easy as simply dragging the box a bit bigger in Freeway. Or adding some margin on one side in Freeway.
  • Template sites need adjusting. Lots of custom input required if you're going to be really fussy. Or to be fair, even if you're only moderately fussy.
  • Several GUI nonsenses, one of which has tripped me up a few times: if you have the Page Inspector onscreen (which you usually do) and you have two sites open, it's possible to switch from one site to another and have the Page Inspector not update its settings to those of the frontmost site. This is actually dangerous—on several occasions I made edits to settings on a site, only to find that I'd altered the site hidden behind it.
  • Over-reliance on PNG graphics. I recently bought a plugin to make photo albums only to find that it ONLY used PNGs, and pictures that were about 400px wide were coming out at 150kb. Actually, RapidWeaver has a perfectly good photo album page-type of its own, and that works fine.
  • There was quite a serious bug in RapidWeaver which I discovered using version 3.5—when making a Photo Album, using TIFFs, RapidWeaver would embed my monitor profile in the JPEGs it made. I have a custom monitor profile which weighs in at around 600Kb (this is suspicious in itself, but irrelevant to this point) and this was added to every JPEG, making them enormous. It added the monitor profile regardless of what it was; an average profile is around 6Kb, so doesn't add much to the size of the picture, but anyone who cares about colour fidelity online would not want their monitor profile added. I'm glad to report that, after I reported it to the authors, it looks as though this is entirely fixed in version 3.6, which seems to embed no profile which, if it's not going to be sRGB, is what we'd want. It's good to see that Realmac Software listen, and act quickly—I told them about this a mere week or so before version 3.6 shipped, and they managed to sneak in a fix before it went live.