Apple and Microsoft have had their say this week, but as we peer into the future (well, next week, anyway), it may be fitting that UserLand has its own announcement:
The next version of Radio is Radio 8, and may be out as soon as tomorrow. It will be $39.95, with a free thirty day demo.
It's more powerful than Blogger ($30) and LiveJournal ($25). 'Course both Blogger and LiveJournal are available anywhere, whereas you'd have to run your own net-accessible peer for Radio to be available anywhere. [clarification] Also LiveJournal gives you cool extras other than better reliability, like the friends page and communities and whatnot. I still have both a Radio blog and a LiveJournal.
The difference is, while everyone's saying how great and easy the new version is, Radio is still very much Frontier underneath, and a platform for network and weblogging-related programming. Radio is an object database, the UserTalk scripting language interpreter, and a heavy paternity of outlining software. As a "Radio tool," Stapler is built on that Frontier power.
That's not to say I wouldn't recommend Radio 8 to a novice user: Radio 8 is much easier than the 7s. 7 is complicated and brittle in places, and really needs some weeding (the whole calendar thing comes to mind) to make it work really well. Radio 7 is usable--maybe even "great"--for geeky persons, and was my introduction to Frontier, but 8 moves forward past fixed flaws with flashy new things.
So keep it in mind if you're looking for weblogging software that can grow with you.
Edited 27 Jan: fixed "Stapler" link, a major source of 404s for some reason. =)
