It was functional, but bland and constrained.
Well designed and supported Semiologic system was used. It consisted of modified WordPress software and multitude of plugins seamlessly integrated and preconfigured. Because of the modifications it was difficult to use templates or themes not specifically designed for it. Theme templates included with it were rather simple to be polite. New, more appealing themes and skins (modified colors and fonts) were added recently. At $295 initially and upgrades at about $170 per year it was relatively expensive for hobbyists. It is primarily used by people trying to sell or market their wares or ideas. You can try it by downloading the free Semiologic theme or purchase Semiologic Pro from semiologic.com site.

Current layout and design is possible by using the Hybrid theme and Life Collage child theme.
Hybrid is well designed semantically. It can be modified by using the basic structure of Hybrid theme and just adding the child theme which contains only the modifications. The Hybrid theme is free, but if you have questions the support is $20 per year. The price is right. After browsing the documentation and reading forums some changes were made to make the site looking the way I wanted it to look. I am tweaking it frequently because, as my niece says, I have OCD.

There are other less costly, like free or almost free, solutions. You can find them by browsing WordPress.org, not to be confused with WordPress.com which is a free web hosting service using WordPress software.

I have been using WordPress for a long time for several reasons. It is structurally well designed and easy to expand by using plugins. There are 7,185 official plugins as of this writing.

Layout and styling of the content is done by using themes. There are 1,042 free themes at this moment. All themes can be customized with choice of different colors, fonts and layout. For example you can chose to have your site with one, two or three columns, fixed or flexible width.

There are web site designers specializing in web templates for WordPress. Their well designed and good looking themes are offered for a fee.

Your friendly search engine will help you find what you are looking for. If you have specific questions, just ask. I will definitely have some answer for you.

Are there deals like this for MS software?
Not any time soon.
If you are still waiting – now is the time to jump the sinking MS ship.

Finally, I got the iPhone SDK!

Above is my first simulation. This stuff is great!

I installed and ran the classic Hello World example on my Mac mini.

Please notice that Mac mini is not a serious software development platform.

I have used other development tools in the past, but the Apple tools are not comparable to anything that ever existed. Did I mention that this tools are free?!

Updated.

Below is the real time view of the above post using the Aspen Simulator. I am not making this up. This is real. Try it yourself.

I wanted to sign up to be an iPhone developer for some time. I could wait no longer. Now together with the other 100,000,000 developers I am waiting to download the iPhone SDK. Unfortunately all I get is the wait and refresh page. From what I have seen watching the demo, the tools are worth waiting for.

You have tried to update iPhone firmware 1.1.3 to 1.1.4 and you got the picture above with the error text below:

The iPhone “Your-iPhone-Name-Here” could not be updated. An unknown error occurred (1602).

The solution shown here applies to iTunes on Mac running Leopard.
I believe that the new firmware requires more strict control of user privileges. The proper way to solve the problem is to login to user account owning the iPhone. When you login to new user account, open iTunes and plugin the iPhone, the message informs you about downloading and installing new firmware. Each user must have the new firmware in a file named /Users/user-name/Library/iTunes/iPhone\ Software\ Updates/iPhone1,1_1.1.4_4A102_Restore.ipsw

The simplest way is to have each user download and install the firmware. The file is large – 160 MB. If you have a lot of users, downloading is a waste of resources (time and space). The firmware update file can be downloaded once and copied to users folder. The firmware file iPhone1,1_1.1.4_4A102_Restore.ipsw must reside in /Users/user-name/Library/iTunes/iPhone\ Software\

Make sure that folder and file ownership are set to the current user.

For me the simplest way to copy files and folders between user accounts is from command line. Below are the Unix commands executed from Terminal. There are only three lines. I know you can combine them into one, but that would be cheating and complicating things. Substitute user1 and user2 with your values.

Explanation shown below.
1. (su -) switch to root user account
2. (cp -R) copy folder and its contents from user1 to user2
3. (chown -R) change permissions for the folder and its contents from user1 to user2

Unix commands shown below.
Direction of the slashes is important. Second line is long and may show here as being broken. It should be typed as one line. You can reduce size of your font untill the line has no break and copy and paste it.

Your-Mac:/ root# su -
Your-Mac:/ root# cp -R /Users/user1/Library/iTunes/iPhone\ Software\ Updates /Users/user2/Library/iTunes/
Your-Mac:/ root# chown -R user2 /Users/user2/Library/iTunes

I have upgraded four iPhones using this method. Let me know if this works for you.