I would like to preface this post with the following:
In no way am I affiliated with Interscape or VisualBlogger 2004. What I will be writing is based soley on a discussion between Robert and I. As I will indulge your minds, I will not disclose any proprietary information that was passed on to me concerning VisualBlogger 2004. However, I feel the information discussed needs to be told, truthfully, and unfortunately its not come from Robert after more than a day of waiting in anticipation.
Here's the skinny...
VisualBlogger 2004 will become a commercial application sometime in July/August, price is unknown to me. The main reasoning behind Robert's decision was due in part that he spent 60+ hours refactoring from Beta 1 to incorporate the (uber cool) provider model. In short, this isn't a bad idea due to the amount of time that has been spent developing the tool.
Prior to becoming the final version, approximately 3-4 more beta's will be released to the public free of charge. During this time, the user interface will get an overhaul, more blog engines will be supported, VS.NET integration will be put into place and a few other awesome things (those of which I cannot divulge). Robert briefly mentioned having two final versions, one of which being a free, but crippled, version of VisualBlogger.
A lot of other factors came into play in his decision, one of which was relating to how the tool has become more than his intial plans of providing a simplistic posting utility that has VS.NET integration. The way I see it, is that Robert too initialy felt this to be a small developers utility, however didn't think of the big picture and over shot the initial plans by far.
Now...I'm sure there's more to it, as well as a definate plan for it, however it seems that we as a community are lacking that information. Robert, we wan't to know what your plans are, its that simple. Maybe after this post, something will come about, but until we see that, we'll just have to wait.
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