The Karelia Blog | Karelia Software

Blueball Design Releases "Trifecta" Design for Sandvox

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 08:01:36 -0800

Last week, Blueball Design completed their long-awaited "Trifecta" for Sandvox. This is quite a special design (or rather, designs, if you include the color variations). We caught up with Charlie Lockhart of Blueball to find out what makes this design special. Note: There are some technical answers to some of these questions that only will make sense to other CSS designers; don't worry if some of his answers don't make sense!

What's special about Trifecta?

Blueball: Trifecta is the first Sandvox design with a 3-column layout to be released. It also has an optional second custom image position in the top of the right hand column that average to advanced Sandvox users using the pro version of Sandvox can switch out using a couple of methods.

What made you decide to develop a 3-column Sandvox design like Trifecta?

Blueball: I was very curious to see why no one had ever developed a 3-column Sandvox design before, and wanted to see if it could be done. Doing a 3-column design with the current Sandvox design structure, turned out to be a real challenge and took almost 5 weeks to complete including a lot of testing and re-testing. I ended up redoing the design's css coding 3 times before I hit on a layout solution that worked in Firefox 3, Safari, AND IE6 and IE7.

What are some tricks that you did in order to achieve this design?

Blueball: Well I used the page-top section for the left hand column and included the logo, title, title paragraph (slogan) and vertical nav menu in it while dropping the banner image normally found in the page-top area due to the narrow fixed width used for it. I floated the sidebar-container div (right side column) to the right and placed all the sidebar content divs there. One of the trickiest layout positioning things I had to work around was how to position the page-content div and the main div within it so that the main div's content displayed within the outer left and right columns. I did this by relatively positioning the page-content div with a 200px top margin and a 180px left margin (to allow for the left outer column and the banner image to show). The I used a relative position for the main div within the page-content div and gave it a right margin of 230px to allow for the display of the outer right column and a -200px top margin to allow me the space to add the banner image into the top background area of the main div. The final trick was to figure out how to make sure all the content in all 3 columns would appear, even if one column's content was shorter than the rest. This was accomplished by first floating the page-bottom div and then clearing it making it always display below the 3 columns. I then placed the page's main background image into the page div which contains the above noted page layout divs and tiled the background image the full height of the page div. Finally a background image was added to the page-bottom div area to appear over the page div's background image to finish off the bottom of the Trifecta page layout.

Anything specific to the Sandvox 1.5 changes that allowed you to do this?

Blueball: Yes there was one big new 1.5 feature I used to make Trifecta work that was not possible in earlier pre 1.5 versions - the Custom Media Sizes function. First, I had to adjust all the default image resizing so images would fit in the non-standard width main content and sidebar (right column) areas. I did this by using Sandvox 1.5's new feature where you can add into the info.plist file a KTScaledImageTypes dictionary group that lets you specify various image's final rescaled sizes which allows you to override Sandvox's default rescaling sizes. This was a must for the Trifecta layout to work in Sandvox 1.5 and all the major browsers.

Second, because of this feature along with the new banner image sizing and banner div selector functions in 1.5, I could also place the banner image outside of the page-top area that in previous versions by default it had to stay within. I ended up placing the banner image into the main div as a background image positioned at the top of the div. I was thrilled to find that the built-in banner swap function worked correctly even though the image was outside the default specified page-top area. To make this happen I had to specify the css div element it was to be displayed within in the info.plist file's bannerCSSSelector string and specify the new sizing of the banner image.

How has the design been received since you announced it over the holiday weekend?

Blueball: So far the initial results have been very positive, and a lot of Sandvox users seem to be excited with the 3 column layout aspect of Trifecta. The email feedback from Sandvox users has also been encouraging, to the point we have decided we will be releasing more 3 column Sandvox designs in 2009.

What kinds of Sandvox users are attracted to your designs?

Blueball: The majority of our Sandvox designs have been used for business or corporate sites, although a surprising number have also been used for educational sites, or by professors and teachers posting curriculum or class information on their own sites, and for church sites. We have also had some Sandvox users develop youth and school team sports sites as well as personal sites.

But by far our Sandvox designs have been used the most for small business and corporate web sites.

Jumsoft Releases Five “Themes” for Sandvox

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:35:52 -0800

Earlier today, we learned that Jumsoft — makers of a number of Mac applications and add-ons for Apple's applications — has joined the ranks of third-party design providers by releasing five beautiful designs for Sandvox.

The designs (or as Jumsoft calls them, “Themes”) are as follows (taking the description from Jumsoft's press release). [Hyperlinks open up a demo website for each design in a new window.]

Business: The background blends from a light color to white, enabling your visitors to keep their attention on the important information. The atmosphere of the Business theme is in between solid and fun, so neutrality is guaranteed.

Color Beauty: Three main colors prevail in Color Beauty theme - white, black, and a bright one that you will choose. Surprisingly, the loudness of the bright colors is not too intense. There are also sheets for the particular layouts so customer's Web site content will be noticed quickly.

Paradise: The Paradise theme has a solid atmosphere with a little bit of fun. The neutral background, which blends from black to grey, allows you to play with other colors without the fear of a too-loud color scheme.

Rainbow: Rainbow theme is vivacious and colorful, providing a bright contrast to white space. The theme is especially good for those who have a convivial outlook on life, but it is also great for anyone wanting to make documents more engaging.

Sensitive Steel (pictured here): This theme stands out against two different things art and steel. The unconventional and successful image of fancy steel lends a feeling of warmth, though the prevailing color in this theme is grey. Sensitive Steel does not work well for strong and serious business images, but it perfectly reveals your artistic spirit and provides a cozy atmosphere for your Web site.

We are really “psyched” to have Jumsoft on-board. We hope you will check out their Sandvox offerings — and all their products, for that matter. Jumsoft really has a great sense of design, and we are happy that they have chosen to apply their good taste to Sandvox!

Sandvox 1.5.3 released; Holiday Savings on Sandvox, Designs, and Hosting

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:26:39 -0800

Sandvox 1.5.3 is now available for downloading from our website. It's a maintenance release that you will want to get if you have an earlier version of our award-winning website builder.

The big news is that we have a special holiday coupon code for Sandvox. If you use the coupon code "SANTAVOX" on our online store, you will get a 20% discount off the regular or Pro edition.

New to our store is the ability to specify somebody else's name for the license, so you can now give Sandvox as a gift for family or friends.

Savings from Blueball Design

We've had great feedback from Sandvox users who've based their sites on designs from Blueball Designs. Charlie Lockhart and his team are now offering several design packages at attractive prices, including the new Quantum design. Quantum features three color schemes and is available in two widths, giving Sandvox users additional flexibility. The Quantum design package also features automatic rescaling of any image above the content area to fit the page's content area, detailed Readme files with tips on maximizing design features, and six Photoshop CS3 Image Files you can use to create custom banner images. Six designs for $10... it's a hard offer to pass up!

Even More Savings from our Hosting Partners

Extending your savings with Sandvox is simple thanks to Live Oak Hosting, Server Logistics, and A2 Hosting, all of whom offer discounts to Sandvox users:

Live Oak Hosting, based in Austin, Texas, is a small, family-run ISP that offers personal service. Hosting plans range from $10-$45 per month with greater savings when paid annually, as well as custom packages. Live Oak promises satisfaction or they will pay your costs to switch to another host. Use the coupon code “sandvox” when you sign up to get a 10 percent discount.
→ Visit Live Oak Hosting.

Server Logistics, based in Los Angeles, California, offers hosting in their secure 10,000 square foot carrier-class data center facility using rock-solid Apple Xserve technology. Prices range from $9.95/month to $69.95 per month with greater savings when paid annually. Server Logistics offers a 30 day money back guarantee. Use the coupon code “SANDVOX” for a 10 percent discount.
→ Visit Server Logistics.

A2 Hosting, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, takes pride in its customer service, 99.99% uptime guarantee, and “green” business practices. Prices range from $4.95 to $7.95 a month for shared hosting, with dedicated, semi-dedicated, and virtual dedicated servers also available. A2 offers a 30 day money back guarantee. Use the coupon code “a2sandvox” for a 15% discount when signing up.
→ Visit A2 Hosting.

We hope that in these tight economic times, we are helping to provide you with a cost-effective way to build and deploy a beautiful website that suits your needs. Whatever your holidays may be, we at Karelia wish that they are happy and healthy.

"I Saw How"

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:30:55 -0800

From time to time we share sites created by Sandvox users that demonstrate certain features or suggest interesting solutions. In this blog post we're delighted to direct your attention to Neil Boyd's site, I Saw How.

Neil has been sharing his enthusiasm for Sandvox in exceptional ways, participating in our online forum and providing excellent feedback to our development team. For those of you who haven't had the benefit of Neil's advice, don't wait another day to visit I Saw How, his Sandvox solutions site filled with helpful tips, screencasts, and a growing bank of step-by-step instructions under the "HowTo" heading. Whether you're starting to experiment with the Code Injection feature of Sandvox Pro or are considering ways to extend the performance and capabilities of your Sandvox site, we encourage you to check in with Neil.

Software Developers Kit for 1.5.x is Available

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:01:35 -0800

Sandvox has been designed from the earliest stages to have a plugin architecture, but we really haven't emphasized that capability up to now because it had a bit of a learning curve. Well, today, with the release of a Software Developers Kit (SDK), we think that we have a way for developers — Cocoa programmers, that is — to build some really cool add-ons to Sandvox.

One thing we had done when we updated Sandvox to 1.5 was to simplify the plugin architecture. Originally we had five plugin types (not including designs, which are another form of plugin). We have consolidated that down to two. This consolidation allows a single plugin (built with a single Xcode project) to build an "element" that is either a page or a pagelet. (Or both: Sometimes it is handy to have a plugin that can be used for either, e.g. YouTube, Contact Form, RSS Feed.) We also allow you to specify how your plugin will handle incoming drag pasteboard actions, allowing Sandvox to recognize a dropped file or URL, and create an appropriate page or pagelet type automatically.

One of the cool tricks about Sandvox plugins is that it's possible to create a plugin without any actual code at all, thanks to the Cocoa Bindings technology. Data that are stored with a plugin is stored with your document as simple keys and values; the inspector can be bound to those properties, and the HTML template reads these values to generate its piece of the HTML.

With this release of the SDK is the source code to almost all of our built-in plugins! We wanted to have the source code available so that other developers can see how much (or little) work is needed to implement each plugin, and adapt our techniques for building new plugins. These are released under a BSD-like license.

Third-party developers can, of course, give away or sell their plugin creations. In a soon-to-be-released version of Sandvox, we will have a "plugin manager" window that will make it easy for Sandvox users to discover and install third-party plugins (and designs), so please let us know when you have built a plugin that you are interested in sharing or selling, so we can help others discover your handiwork.

Check out our main SDK website, or just download the SDK package directly. Also, be sure to participate in our new Sandvox Developer Forum if you have any issues or comments about the SDK. We are certainly interested in improving our documentation and examples to make it easy for others to build on the Sandvox platform!

Sandvox 1.5.2 is released!

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:46:14 -0800

In other news, we at Karelia released version 1.5.2 of Sandvox today. Over 50 enhancements in this update.

Read the details on our press release.

Karelia's iMedia Browser updated to version 1.1.2

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:34:57 -0700

Today we are updating our free iMedia Browser utility to version 1.1.2. As you might guess from the version number, it is a minor update. Here are some highlights of this update:

Fix a problem parsing older iPhoto libraries
Maintain selection path in the source between launches
Improve live updating of libraries
Fix to lightroom database parsing
Lots of bugfixes
Fix several memory leaks
Improvements to problem report sending
Filter out invalid addresses in the email address combo box
Localization updates

The full release notes are available here.

Database Connection Problems Saturday Night

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 08:17:58 -0700

Well, the last 15 hours have been interesting, to say the least. Most of our back-end databases stopped functioning some time around 5:30 PM (California Time) Saturday evening. We just now managed to restore service.

This outage probably didn't affect a lot of people, but for those who did, we apologize for the interruption!

The databases affected were our payment processing system, so people who tried to purchase Sandvox would have had issues; our customer and mailing lists databases, which means attempts to subscribe or unsubscribe from our mailing lists would have failed; our page counter database, so people with Sandvox sites that have page counter pagelets installed would have missed some updates; and our database that Sparkle (the application updating engine) connects to, so attempts to check for new updates to Sandvox or iMedia Browser would not have worked.

We are still investigating the root cause of the problem (or really, asking our Internet Service Provider to look into the issue) but we are relieved that our systems are back on-line. If you have any concerns, please drop us a line and we'll try to get things resolved ASAP.

Embedding a Google Calendar with Sandvox Pro

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:11:28 -0700

This topic came up on the Sandvox Yahoo! discussion group (which you can check out in addition to our online Sandvox forum). It was useful so we thought it would be a good idea to expand this and discuss it on the blog here.

You can use Sandvox Pro, via a Raw HTML Page or Raw HTML Pagelet, to embed a Google Calendar in your website.

Read the Rest

A Tour of the New Designs in Sandvox 1.5

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:31:25 -0700

One of the nice updates in the new Sandvox 1.5 is the seven new designs. This is a little tour of them.

Many people ask (OK, nobody asks, but maybe somebody is curious) where these design names come from. Really, it depends. Usually it's inspired by something in the design itself. Sometimes the designer him/herself will come up with something and it just sticks. Or, we'll pick an idea out of the air, or a song title, or a book….

Without further ado, here are some thumbnails. Each of these screenshots have a custom banner element applied; you can add your own imagery to make the design truly yours.

"Stars" is pretty obvious. We like the way that hovered items show a star over certain menu and title elements when you hover the mouse over them.

We have a lot of blue-themed designs, so how do you invoke the idea of blue but without saying blue?

Sometimes a literal name just fits. This design name reminds us of a fine liqueur or chocolate.

Another literal name; this is one of our few designs that stretches to fit the enclosing browser window.

Here's a title inspired by a song title. Of course there are many artists with a song "Into the Blue" such as the Mission, Manual, Heaven 17, Moby, and so on. We'll let you decide which one fits this look. No, we haven't seen the Jessica Alba movie of the same name.

The "Minty Fresh" name started out with the mint-green color of the design. We got our inspiration from a character from a couple of Christopher Moore's books.

"Distinction" was a hard one to name. The bold orange swatch (reminiscent of some popular Wordpress blogs) is certainly distinctive. It may have helped that Dan recently re-discovered the band "Kitchens of Distinction," and may have been listening to one of their tracks recently.

This concludes our tour of the new designs in Sandvox. There are forty-three other designs in Sandvox 1.5 (many which have been revamped to allow for custom banners) so check them out!

Contact Form Reverted (for now)

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:19:00 -0700

We've taken the contact form back to the way it was, for now; the new method was causing some problems for people with automatic email processing rules.

We are looking for a solution to give MobileMe (and possibly other service) users a way to get their email, but it is better not to impact existing websites.

If you are using the contact form, and you have trouble getting email sent to you, please let us know so we can figure out why.

Minor Adjustment to Contact Form

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:47:28 -0700

One of Sandvox's most popular features is the Contact Form, a page or pagelet that allows people to send you messages by filling out a form. As of Sandvox 1.5 we've enhanced the capabilities of this form — we'll highlight some of those changes in an upcoming post — but we wanted to mention a change we've put into effect behind the scenes that may affect how you process your incoming emails.

Historically, our processor for the contact form would build up an email message and make it appear as if it came from the email address of the person who filled out the form.

However, it has come to our attention that Apple's MobileMe (and legacy mac.com) mail service doesn't take to that too well. Probably in place as a spam-fighting technique, MobileMe does not accept an incoming email from an address that claims to come from mac.com or me.com, when in fact it doesn't.

So as of today, we've adjusted the way we build emails just a bit. Now, emails you receive from people who fill out a Sandvox contact form will appear to come from the address contact_form_no_reply@karelia.com. (This is not a real email address.) However, the message also includes the "Reply-To" header of the sender's email address, so that you can reply to that email message easily.

If you are using the contact form in Sandvox and this causes you any problems, please let us know. We think that for the most part it will increase the likelihood that you receive all the messages sent via the contact form.

1.5.1 Help Problem: Here's a workaround

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:44:16 -0700

Just after we released version 1.5.1 of Sandvox we discovered a problem that we accidentally introduced into the online help. This came as a bit of a surprise — there is a missing image file, something that wouldn't be a problem if you viewed the help pages in a web browser. But in Apple's help viewer, a missing image is a big deal, as we have just learned the hard way.

So, we have a quickie workaround for you to apply to your copy of Sandvox 1.5.1. We will have this fixed in the next version and even the next beta release we make, but we wanted to get this out there as soon as possible.

(If you don't want to bother with this, you can always use our online version of the help documentation at docs.karelia.com for now.)

To apply the fix, click on this link. It will open up your "Script Editor" utility with an AppleScript. Just click the green "Run" button and you should be on your way. (Note: This script assumes that your application is called "Sandvox"; if you've renamed somehow, the script may have some problems finding your copy. Also, the application needs to be writable; if you have it on a read-only volume, the script won't work.)

Sandvox 1.5.1 is available

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:03:50 -0700

On the heels of last week's release of version 1.5 we're releasing an update, Sandvox 1.5.1, and recommending that all Sandvox 1.5 customers take advantage of this update.

The response to 1.5 has been tremendous, and we're grateful to all the customers who submitted comments, suggestions, feature requests, congratulations, and, yes, complaints. While we couldn't address everyone's feedback in 1.5.1, we wanted to get this first batch of improvements out to everyone as quickly as possible.

Most importantly, we discovered an issue with using Save As under Tiger (OS X 10.4) that, in some circumstances, caused site documents to become corrupted if Save As was used to save back to the same path. Given the potential for document corruption, we wanted this update to go out now, rather than a couple of weeks from now as we had originally scheduled.

Grab the update by using Sandvox > Check for Update or by downloading directly here.

The complete release notes are available here.

If you don't see your particular issue listed, rest assured that we are madly working on 1.5.2 and beyond. We just wanted to get these first improvements out to as wide an audience as possible.

Keep the feedback coming and thanks again for your support!

Sandvox Success Stories

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:43:18 -0700

A while ago, on the Yahoo! Sandvox group, we asked Sandvox users to submit their stories of how they have used Sandvox successfully to get themselves on the Web. We were overwhelmed with responses. We've sent out a few of these to our Email Alert List, so these might look familiar if you have been receiving that mailing, but we will mix in some web-only stories as well in future installments.

Chuck Dresel is a middle school teacher at Redwood Middle School in Napa, California. Using Sandvox and the Cathedral design to create a website for his Social Studies 7 class means that Mr. Dresel can spend more time on student work and less time maintaining the site. He wrote:

I'm a middle school teacher who doesn't have a lot of time to maintain a quality website for my class/students. Sandvox is the perfect tool for me because it allows me to quickly and easily provide my students with all the information they need to stay successful in my class and it really looks great. I use the blog collection to post and manage homework assignments; most documents that students need for my class are available from various download collections; students are able to access their current grades which are posted on the same server via ftp and then linked back to the Sandvox site; students can earn extra credit by completing several web-based geolab assignments that incorporate QuickTime video and audio files; and of course it is very easy to contact me using the contact form pagelet. Sandvox also makes it really easy to incorporate some really cool add-ons like Google custom search. Thanks again for making a great product.

Michael Schein describes himself as a poet and attorney, but he might add website designer to that list! Based in Seattle, Washington, Mr. Schein used Sandvox and the Gnarled design to create a website that showcases his writing (including his latest novel, Just Deceits), announces readings and personal appearances, and lets his readers share their feedback with him.

Sixteen months in the making, Sandvox 1.5 is released!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:10:39 -0700

Early last May, over a year ago, we were working on Sandvox version 1.2.1, but we knew we needed to start working on a major new version of Sandvox that would eliminate a lot of the issues we were seeing with our initial architecture. So we split our code base into two branches: one for continued, minor updates to the shipping Sandvox, and another for a major rewrite of the application. Maybe not quite from the ground up, but at least from the knees up.

It's a big upgrade. It features major improvements to media processing, new and enhanced pagelets, fifty design templates, new blogging features, and for Sandvox Pro Edition, new Code Injection points. We'll let you read the press release for the overview, or you can even read the release notes if you are one of the twelve people who wants to get a more detailed change list. (And even that isn't particularly detailed: We counted 3,370 incremental updates to our program code for Sandvox since we started this branch!)

Doing a major rewrite like this was a huge undertaking, and normally a major new version like this would get a new major version number like "2.0," except that most of the work in this effort was under the hood, and a 2.0 version of an application needs to look like a big change. So we decided to call this version 1.5. Sure there would be plenty of new visible features but most of our work is not that obvious.

One of the biggest changes in Sandvox 1.5 is how the source document is stored. In 1.0 through 1.2.8, all the data — pages, images, even QuickTime movies — were stored in a single database file. It worked, except it was extremely fragile, as we discovered perhaps too late. The WebView, the component that is also used by Apple's Safari to display web pages, was loading pages and their subordinate images directly from our database, at the same time that we were trying to load information about the document. Behind the scenes, it was a mess! This might not be so bad, except that we found (to our surprise) that people were building websites of several hundred pages in size, not a few dozen as we had anticipated. So we needed to handle bigger, more complicated websites. Thanks to some helpful tips from our friends, we figured out how to store the data in a package — essentially, a folder that looks like a file. This simplified the whole process quite a bit and allowed for some big speedups and improvements in stability.

Another major change under the hood was the way we synchronized the changes that you, the Sandvox user made on the screen with the data stored in our database. The old way worked, more or less, but it was problematic and slow because we would load the entire WebView when anything changed. The new way is quite streamlined; we're very proud of it. What you'll notice is faster response to just about everything.

Because this was such a major rewrite, it took a long time — longer than we expected, naturally. We were finally able to share our first alpha versions starting with a tiny group of friends back in April, and then making beta versions of Sandvox to a wider audience in June when we made it available via our Yahoo! group. The people who tried out Sandvox in these stages and sent in countless feedback messages deserve our heartiest thanks.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to extend our special thanks to Mike Abdullah. Although some of you may have corresponded with Mike on support issues, he has made enormous, vital, and all too often unsung contributions directly to the engineering of Sandvox 1.5. We are very grateful for both his code and his good-natured approach. Thanks for joining the team, Mike!

What's ahead for Sandvox? We have some great plans for 2.0 that we started drafting out earlier this summer (when the three of us had the rare opportunity to be in the same room together). We think you'll like what we come up with. But, we expect that it will take longer than expected to finish.

Sandvox 1.2.8 is available; ready for MobileMe

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:18:33 -0700

Earlier today — some might say late last night — we released version 1.2.8 of Sandvox. It is available for downloading from the Karelia website.

Its main new feature is compatibility with MobileMe. While legacy Sandvox sites can still be published to their old “homepage.mac.com” URLs, new sites can be set up to be viewed on MobileMe's “me.com” domain.

We've also added built-in support for MobileMe personal domains, where your web pages are hosted by the MobileMe service while you use your own domain name.

Help Wanted - Inquire Within

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:30:39 -0700

Occasionally at Karelia we look for contractors to fill a few needs that go beyond software development. One of the best ways to reach people, we've found, is through blogs. If you think either of the descriptions, below, sound like you, please drop us a line at contractors_summer08@karelia.com — or pass this information on to somebody you know who might fit the bill.

First/Second Level Technical Support

We're looking for a “power user” who can help Sandvox customers with questions about using the application. Somebody who can really dig deeply into reported issues to understand what is happening, reproduce problems, provide solutions for customers and report encapsulated issues to the engineering team. Interaction is done over a web-based email interface. Good “people” skills are a must.

Graphic Artist/Designer

We're always on the lookout to expand our web design offerings for Sandvox; we're looking for one or more designers who can produce world-class web designs for Sandvox. Designs that make the discerning Mac user absolutely drool are what we are looking for! We're also working on another software product, under wraps, that will need some major artistic touches. Send us links to your online portfolio if you are interested!

Karelia iMedia Browser 1.1 is now available

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:25:22 -0700

We're pleased to announce that we have just released a new version of our iMedia Browser. This is a free program.

With this standalone utility, which you can activate from your dock or a small icon in the menu bar, you browse images, sounds, movies, or links from this compact window and drag them into any application.

Version 1.1 provides a number of Leopard-specific fixes, adds support for Adobe Lightroom, brings in Help pages, and incorporates the feedback reporter that we have in Sandvox. You can see the full set of release notes, showing changes since our 1.0 version, here.

Download iMedia Browser 1.1 here.

Karelia on Facebook and Twitter

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:37:48 -0700

Everybody's doing Facebook these days, so we thought we'd create a Sandvox group there. So if you are a Facebook member, come on by and use it chat about Sandvox!

The other big thing is Twitter, so we made a feed where we will keep the world up to date with what we are doing, in more frequent bite-size chunks than we put here. We will be giving you a peek behind the scenes as we put together our updates to Sandvox and other apps. Our latest “tweet” can be found in the sidebar of our Blog page, but come by and visit us on Twitter to see all our updates. If you use Twitter yourself — We recommend using a great desktop application called Twitterrific — please follow us!

The Sandvox Yahoo! Group

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:30:09 -0700

Sandvox users, have you signed up for the Sandvox Yahoo! Group? If not, we wanted to suggest you give it a spin. The group has reached a critical mass in the last couple of months to where just about every question or comment gets a helpful reply from a "guru" user (or from one of the Karelians if somebody doesn't beat us to it).

Even if you don't have a question, it's good to see what others are doing with Sandvox; it might give you some ideas on how to enhance your own website. Feel free to browse the message archives.

So come join the group! If you don't have a Yahoo! account, you can still sign up for the group in mailing-list mode. Just use the form below to sign up. See you there!

Sandvox 1.2.7 is available

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:32:50 -0700

We've been fiercely working on the new 1.5 version of Sandvox (ready for "alpha" stage soon) but meanwhile, we want to give Sandvox users access to a few important fixes. Download the new 1.2.7 version of Sandvox here.

For Sandvoxers running on an Intel machine and using Leopard, this update will be helpful, because we have finally found a way to work around an annoying graphical bug in Leopard that we reported to Apple last October! For those designs that use graphical text, you can go back to those fancy titles once you update to the new version.

We've also updated the embedded media browser to better cache movie thumbnails. (We'll be updating the freeware iMedia Browser application soon to reflect that change, in a few days.)

We're also welcoming A2 Hosting to our list of recommended publishing hosts. One of their benefits is their inexpensive hosting plans. They are offering 10% off all hosting packages with the coupon code tenoffa2. (This offer expires 30 June 2008.)

This update holds a number of other fixes and improvements, so give it a spin!

Sandvoxed!

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:35:27 -0700

Gary at SandvoxWebDesigns has created a nice new online resource: Sandvoxed. It's a showcase of Sandvox-built websites.

The website is just underway, but already it's filling up with a number of user-submitted websites. The thumbnails, which expand to full-size, working websites when you click on them, are organized by design type. It's interesting to see a variety of websites all centered on the same design. Take "Earth & Sky," used also by our own website.

If you've published a website using Sandvox, you can easily submit your site to be included in the list.

There are also some fun badges you can put on your website, like this one:

Easter Eggs!

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 07:19:37 -0700

Get ready to hunt some eggs! Karelia is participating in a fun program starting this week. It's called the Easter mEgg Hunt ("m" for Mac) and it's a way to expose Mac users to a variety of "indie" software.

Starting on Monday, through the end of the month, you can hunt for "eggs" hidden on participating websites (like ours). Clicking on an egg will enable a group of coupon codes, valid at other participating websites. Collect eggs until you find that app you have been looking for (like Sandvox), or until you have collected them all! In the process, you'll become familiar with a number of indie Mac developers and their software products.

Thanks to Pierre of Houdah for organizing this event.

Happy Hunting!

New Screencast: How the Karelia Website is Built with Sandvox

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:40:48 -0800

A number of people have told us that they didn't realize that our own website is built with Sandvox. Well, it is! The nine-minute screencast linked here shows you how we put it together using Sandvox.

New Third-Party Sandvox Designs Available

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:42:26 -0800

Last week, two third-party designers released new Sandvox design packages.

Sandvox Web Designs announced the availability of "Franchise." This is a wide design, available in a blue and dark gray variation. This design includes a package of 100 banner graphics to help customize your website. This design joins the earlier "Suspicion" and "New Day" designs released a while back.

Blueball Design also released a new design pack, "Blueball Cubicle." This design comes in a standard and wide variation, and includes 20 extra banner images. This design joins their existing "Blueball Smooth" and "Blueball Pro Tabs" design packages.

We are more than pleased to see other designers getting on the Sandvox bandwagon and building their own new designs. (CSS designers who want to dig in can check out our detailed documentation page to get started.)

Macworld Expo Wrap-up

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:38:07 -0800

Last week was a whirlwind week for Terrence and Dan. Our first time exhibiting at Macworld, the four days went by in a blur. We spoke to several hundred people, gave out nifty postcard flyers for Sandvox, gave countless demonstrations, and (only occasionally) got a chance to check out the rest of the show floor.

Whenever we met current Sandvox users, we'd ask if we could take their picture—along with their website— for our "rogues gallery." Here are some of our proud Sandvox-using visitors:

John Budacovich, a Mac consultant, posed with his website, Solutions-Mac LLC.

Videographer Charles Dill of Neptune Beach Media.

Mac Developer Scott Gruby with his website for ReceiptWallet. Nice to see other Mac indie companies using Sandvox for their websites!

Fabrice Herrain of BusinesSense, showing his customized variation of our "Rounded Blue" design.

Mike Matthews with his Pac10 Compliance Corner website.

David Morgenstern of "The Apple Core" with one of his several Sandvox-created websites, Congregation Beth Israel-Judea.

Loren Naiman with his website (created using one of the BlueBall Design add-ons), LA-ADDA: Association of Deputy District Attorneys.

Mario Panighetti with his personal site, hosted at mac.com.

Mac Developer Raphael Sebbe of Creaceed shows off his website with a customized design.

Report from Macworld Expo

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:43:04 -0800

Macworld Expo is halfway over as of this writing. The halls have been swarming with the Mac elite, and Karelia Software is happy to be a part of it!

Our booth is adjacent to the big Apple pavilion where the curious crowd around floating Macbook Airs and tables with strapped-down iPhones. We’re in a wonderful location—a “village” of indie Mac developers.

Most of the time we spend here is in demonstrating Sandvox to prospective users, but our favorite thing to do is to meet current Sandvox users! So if you are at Macworld this week, be sure to come by and say “hi” at booth S-1338 — we might even take your picture with your website for our “rogue’s gallery” of Sandvox users.

Also, if you see this guy wandering around the halls, be sure to take his picture; maybe he’ll take yours!

Sandvox 1.2.6 is released

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:43:48 -0800

In time for us to show off at Macworld Expo next week, we've just made Sandvox 1.2.6 available for download.

This is primarily a Leopard-compatibility and Google tools update. If you were having problems with the keychain not finding your password during publishing, this should fix it. We've also updated our Google features to track the latest standards. If you use Google Analytics or Google Sitemaps, you'll want to grab 1.2.6 to stay up to date.

One important note about this version is that it now requires Mac OS 10.4.11 or higher. We needed to make some changes to the way Sandvox launches in order to make it compatible with the new Leopard firewall. Fortunately, the updates in 10.4.11 make this possible. As added benefit, 10.4.11 and Leopard share the Safari 3 WebKit which means that Sandvox no longer needs to bundle its own custom WebKit. The Sandvox download is now 15% smaller!

Almost all of our users have upgraded to Leopard or updated to Tiger 10.4.11, so we hope this change comes as a welcome surprise. If you're not running a compatible version of Mac OS X and can't or don't want to update, please continue to use 1.2.5.

See you at Macworld!

Come Visit Karelia at Macworld Expo, Booth S-1338

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:17:33 -0800

We will be at Macworld Expo next week, at booth S-1338, along with other Apple Design Award winners, just behind the big Apple pavilion in South Hall.

We love meeting Sandvox users, so we do hope you'll come by and say hello to Terrence, Dan, and Netan. You can take a sneaky peek at a few features of our upcoming version. And if you want to show off your Sandvox-created website, we'll be ready to take your picture!

(If you haven't gotten a ticket yet, get it here; this link gets you an exhibit hall ticket for $10 or 15% off selected conference programs.)

Lemur Saving Season

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:43:29 -0800

Happy New Year! The end of the year, whether it's because it's a time to reflect on the state of the world, or just tax purposes, is a traditional time for making donations to charitable causes. Here is a story about one that we thought we would pass along.

Mike Lee, progammer at Delicious Monster, recently issued a challenge to the Mac developer community to donate to the Madagascar Fauna Group, an organization working to conserve Madagascar's lemurs and other spectacular wildlife. He started up Club Thievey, an appeal to donate with an interesting twist: Mike will send you a plush lemur just like his if you make a donation of $100 or $10/month. (Naturally, we signed up — when the "world's toughest programmer" issues a challenge, we are quick to respond!)

This challenge may have been targeted to Mac developers, but Mike states that Mac usage and programming experience are not actual requirements. So we thought we mention this to the readers of this weblog. Make your donation by Midnight tonight for a coveted spot in the Founding Troop. We're not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds like a good idea!

Sandvox Featured on MacSanta

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:01:22 -0800

Tomorrow, December 8, Sandvox will be a featured application — with a 20% discount — on MacSanta. If you have been putting off purchasing a license to Sandvox, or you'd like to stuff somebody's stocking, tomorrow is the day!

Since December 8 has already arrived in some parts of the world, we're activating the coupon code early, so starting now, the coupon code MACSANTA07 will give you a 20% discount at our online store.

So far, this "grassroots" promotion by and for independent Mac software vendors has featured deals from the friends of ours at Noodlesoft, Vela Design Group, CocoaTech, Red Sweater Software, Clickable Bliss, Rogue Amoeba, C-Command Software, Potion Factory, and many more. Even if you've missed the featured day with a 20% discount, you can still get a 10% discount by using "MACSANTA07TEN" as your coupon code for any of the companies found on this ever-growing list.

MacSanta is a great way to find out about quality software from independent developers. Help spread the word about MacSanta by digging it!

MacSanta Begins Today; Sandvox Featured Soon

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 09:47:19 -0800

Happy December! Today marks the beginning of the MacSanta promotion — hosted by the fine folks at Rogue Amoeba — which offers discounts on software created by independent Mac software developers.

Each day, five companies (and their applications) are featured, with discounts of twenty percent off — but only for that day. If you missed that day's deals, you can still get a ten percent discount through the end of the month.

Karelia Software's Sandvox will be featured in about a week; we'll be sure to mention it here just beforehand.

So be sure to visit MacSantaDeals.com every day throughout December — or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed to be automatically notified each day — to be introduced to a variety of software packages created by "indie" vendors. Most of these are demoware ("try before you buy") so you can really take them for a spin and see if they are right for you.

Whether or not you believe in Santa Claus, there is certainly reason to believe in MacSanta.

Even More Leopard Compatibility

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:31:13 -0800

We've decided to put out another version of Sandvox, right on the heels of the recent update, to provide even more Leopard compatibility. This fixes some late-breaking issues that we discovered only recently. Go download version 1.2.5 now, and then for those celebrating Thanksgiving, enjoy your holiday!

New Sandvox is Leopard-Compatible

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:44:29 -0800

Now that Leopard has been out in the wild for a few days, we have had the opportunity to apply our final batch of fixes to Sandvox to make sure that it runs as smoothly as possible under the new version of Mac OS. Most of the fixes to Sandvox were actually workarounds for new behaviors (intended or otherwise) in Leopard.

The caveat that that we mentioned earlier about Graphical Titles still applies. We certainly hope that Apple will address this problem in Mac OS X 10.5.1.

Download Sandvox 1.2.4 now!

Leopard Compatibility Watch: Graphical Titles

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:26:39 -0700

Sandvox users who are wondering if they should upgrade to Leopard just yet may want to hear about Sandvox and graphical text titles — titles that are rendered as a graphical image by Sandvox.

We've found a bug in the initial release of Leopard, on several kinds of Intel-based Macs, that causes these graphical titles to be either colored oddly or nearly invisible. We have reported the bug to Apple — they already know about it, and will be using the testing harness we provided to help isolate and fix the problem. Soon, we hope!

So, until Apple can fix the bug and release an update to Leopard, this feature is just not going to work for many users. If your website uses this feature and you haven't upgraded yet to Leopard, you may want to wait. If you have already installed Leopard and you need to update your site, we recommend that you temporarily turn off the checkbox "Replace titles with graphical text" from the Site → Media inspector. Your title will be visible, but just not look as cool. We'll announce here when Apple has released a version of Leopard that works properly with this feature, so you can turn this feature back on and re-publish your site.

Sandvox's Leopard Roadmap

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:02:47 -0700

Leopard is just around the corner — just under two days at this writing. The current (1.2.3) version of Sandvox works pretty well under Leopard, and we plan to achieve 100% compatibility very soon.

We've found a few minor fixes that we need to apply to make Sandvox be completely Leopard-compatible. We plan on releasing a minor upgrade (1.2.4) some time in the next two weeks, once we have resolved a few issues that we will need to check against the final release version of the operating system — Hopefully Apple has fixed their bugs that affect Sandvox!

For those who are getting Leopard right away, and want to continue using Sandvox, we are making a beta version of 1.2.4 available right away. (Normally we only make these betas available to our Yahoo! group, but we wanted to make it more generally available.)

This beta has a handful of other useful fixes, so Tiger users are of course welcome to try it as well.

Please make a copy of your Sandvox site document(s) before using the beta version, just to be extra-safe. We don't anticipate any problems, but backing up your data is always a good idea in any case!

Download the beta here.

Great Tutorial on Modifying a Sandvox Design

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:48:19 -0700

Sandvox ships with over forty designs, many of them customizable, but there is sometimes a need to adapt one of our designs for a truly unique look for your website. Thomas Green did just that. This morning on our Yahoo! discussion group for Sandvox, he announced that he has posted a wonderful tutorial (PDF) on modifying the "minimalist" design that comes with Sandvox. Thanks, Thomas, for making such a useful resource available!

Stand-alone iMedia Browser Now Available

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:01:47 -0700

Today we are releasing a free utility, the Karelia iMedia Browser: a stand-alone version of the iMedia browser that we originally built for Sandvox.

Members of our email alert list have already had an opportunity to download this utility, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It's now possible to make use of the iMedia browser from just about any application, and drag images, sounds, movies, or links from this compact window into your content.

A Community Effort

We started writing our own media browser, owing to the fact that Apple has not made available a standardized component for application developers to incorporate. Several other companies approached us about incorporating the browser into their applications, so we made it an open-source project with a limited release. We have highlighted some of the contributors (and users) on the sidebar of the Karelia iMedia Browser's home page; please be sure to check out their applications.

Open Source

Now that the project has stabilized, and in order to encourage more developers to incorporate the browser into their own applications, we have opened up the gates, hosting the browser at Google Code so that any developer can download the code and incorporate it into their own application (subject to the terms of the BSD license, of course).

Sandvox 1.2.3 Released

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:32:35 -0700

We have just bumped up Sandvox to a new version, 1.2.3, ready for download.

This release hasn't changed much on the surface from the last version, but we have improved a lot "under the hood." We have made some optimizations that greatly speed up performance when publishing large sites. Many of our beta testers have been pleased with the speedups in opening and navigating sites with hundreds of images. We have also improved the handling of images embedded with text, to speed up processing and fix a few bugs.

Some other updates of interest:

Many of our designs have been refreshed for better compatibility with Internet Explorer version 7. It is probably worth re-publishing your Sandvox site so that visitors using IE 7 will have a better view of your website.
We've added automatic support for PicLens, a Safari plugin that generates full-screen slideshows that we mentioned in our last mailing, in all photo albums and photo weblogs.
We've added some initial support for .Mac "personal domains" (see the Help pages for this).

Karelia's Fall User Group Tour Commences

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:16:26 -0700

Tonight is the kick-off for an informal "tour" of local Mac User Groups (MUGs) to showcase Sandvox.

Dan and Terrence will be appearing at MUGs in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles area over the next few months. This is in conjunction with a special MUG discount on Sandvox, happening for a limited time. (User group members, check your newsletter for information on the discount.)

For user groups not in our area, who want to do their own home-grown presentation of Sandvox, Karelia will provide two licenses to Sandvox Pro that can be given away as a door prize. User Group leaders can contact us for details on this (or to arrange a demo in the LA/SF areas).

The schedule so far - we'll post updates as they become available:

Monday October 1: SMUG, Palo Alto CA

Tuesday, October 16: DVMUG, Walnut Creek CA

Monday, December 17: SVMUG, Cupertino CA

Tuesday, December 18: MacNexus, Sacramento CA

TeleMoose: on Hiatus

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:15:10 -0700

Amazon.com has informed us that they do not want their customers to search or make purchases via TeleMoose. Why? We're not entirely sure, and the few reasons we have been given suggest that Amazon.com doesn't quite understand that TeleMoose is a win-win-win web application—for users, for Karelia Software, and for Amazon.com itself.

Another major online shopping portal—one that recognizes the possibilities of TeleMoose—has already given us the nod, and we'll be ready to unveil a brand new TeleMoose shortly.

Temporary Page Counter Hiccups

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:16:30 -0700

Sandvox users who are using the "Page Counter" pagelet may notice some strange numbers for the next few days. As part of Karelia's transition to a new server for hosting our website and services, we have just moved our database that records page views to its new location. This kind of change takes a few hours or a few days to propagate around the Internet. If you see the number "9999" for number of page views, do not panic — this is just temporary. Your page counts will be restored to their correct version when the server transition is complete.

Bonus Design Pack Now Available

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:49:29 -0700

We had some technical glitches in getting the bonus design pack updated. It is now available and ready for download. If you are on our email alert list, use the link we provided in the message we sent out recently, or enter your email address here to get the URL sent to you right away. Check the "READ ME" file; the new version indicates that is is version 1.2.2 of July 2007.

Sandvox 1.2.2 Released

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:01:17 -0700

We've just released an update to Sandvox: Version 1.2.2 addresses issues raised in bug reports and requests that have been submitted by our users. To anticipate viewing of sites on iPhones we also updated every design to minimize the need to zoom in on the iPhone screen.

In addition to the designs that are bundled with Sandvox, we've updated those that are part of the "bonus pack" that you receive as a member of our email alert list. (The bonus designs are Black and White, Cabernet, Dashed, Mezzanote, and Two Lines.) If you are using any of the bonus designs, watch your email for a note containing the URL of the new versions. Or enter your email address here to get a fresh URL for the revised designs sent to you right away.

Be sure to publish your entire site after updating to 1.2.2 (and reinstalling the bonus designs as needed) so all pages of your site pick up the updated designs.

Help Wanted: Tech Support

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:53:54 -0700

Are you a savvy Mac/Sandvox user with a couple of hours of spare time each day to help other Sandvox users? We're looking for a friendly person to work as a contractor to perform front-line technical support for Sandvox.

Prior experience with technical support is not necessary; we have procedures in place that will make it easy to do the job. What is required is a thorough understanding of Sandvox, consistent time availability (about two hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week), problem-solving abilities, excellent English communication, and good skills dealing with other people (over email, using our web-based support system). Communication with the other Karelia folks would be done over email, chat, and voice; the support work can be performed at home or anywhere!

If you are interested in becoming a part of the Karelia team, drop us a line.

CocoaRadio Interview about TeleMoose

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:48:57 -0700

Dan was at iPhoneDevCamp this last weekend, where he got to speak with Blake Burris of CocoaRadio about TeleMoose (recently rated as one of the 8 coolest applications for the iPhone). You can check out the interview with Dan, along with other notable iPhone application builders, here.

iPhone application updates

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:03:59 -0700

We've changed the name of our iPhone project mentioned in our last posting: Its new name is TeleMoose and you can find it at TeleMoose.com. We'll have more news about it shortly, but we wanted to get the correct URL out there sooner rather than later.

Now that we have our iPhones in hand to put TeleMoose through its paces, we've fixed a lot of issues with the beta; we've been continually updating the version on the website. Dan will be attending iPhoneDevCamp this weekend to share and learn more secrets of iPhone development.

We're also adjusting our Sandvox designs slightly to better accommodate the iPhone. We'll have a minor update out soon.

Introducing Amaphone (Beta)

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:05:22 -0700

iPhone Fever. We know you've got it — so do we. Today, to coincide with the launch of the iPhone, we are announcing Amaphone™, the easiest way to browse and shop Amazon.com on an iPhone.

This was a natural new project for us. Users of Watson may recall its valuable front-end to Amazon.com, and Sandvox users have by now discovered the ability to build Amazon.com content in your own Website, using a dynamic inspector for loading and displaying items from the Amazon stores. Amaphone uses the same technology that Watson and Sandvox do to retrieve content directly from Amazon and display it without the clutter and long waits for pages to load.

For readers who don't yet have their own iPhone, don't fret — you can still simulate the experience by visiting amaphone.com from your desktop (Safari-only for now) or the cool iPhoney application (Be sure to set 'iPhone User Agent').

As more people get their iPhones, we expect to get some good feedback about Amaphone. The application includes a button for emailing your comments directly from the iphone.

A New Karelia Website

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:06:36 -0700

Karelia's website has a new look!

If you get your Karelia news from within Sandvox or your favorite RSS reader and haven't seen it, be sure to head over to the Karelia site to check it out!

Like the previous incarnation, it's built entirely within Sandvox's Pro Edition. Our new site is based on the "Earth & Sky" design and features a custom banner image. Among the new content are sections devoted to Reviews, a Sandvox Site Gallery that shows off some excellent examples of customer-created sites, and Good Karma, where we will share news about Mac developers, products, and events we find innovative or particularly helpful. We've also added new content to the sidebars of several pages, so be sure to visit the new site and see Sandvox in action!

Email Alerts: Are you subscribed to our Email Alert List? If you haven't yet subscribed and want to be among the first to receive information about releases as well as the latest Karelia news, go directly to the signup page and enter your email address. If you're not sure if you're on the list, subscribing again will not result in duplicate mail, so we encourage you to do so. We don't share our email list with anyone and keep our email focused on Sandvox matters. And if you wish to unsubscribe, you can do so whenever you want.

Sandvox gets an Apple Design Award

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 23:03:31 -0700

We're quite proud to announce that Sandvox 1.2 was awarded runner-up in the 2007 Apple Design Awards for the category of "Best Mac OS X User Experience."

We are at Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) this week, where each year only a few applications are chosen from a huge pool of entries for several categories, including User Experience, Games, Scientific, Widgets, Developer Tools, and Leopard application.

Each year, Apple packs the house with a glitzy show, not quite as big as the Academy Awards in Hollywood, but certainly a grand event in the Macintosh world. Before the winners were announced this year, they presented an immersive slideshow featuring winners of the awards since 2001; it was great to see Watson (a winner in 2002) there — and to hear the applause when it appeared onscreen! Then the winners and runner-ups in each category were announced. They saved the User Experience category (by far the most competitive) for last, which just added to our tension! When they announced our application as runner-up, the three Karelians (Terrence, Dan, and our newest engineer Mike) ran up on stage to collect and admire our cube-shaped trophy as one of the presenters gave a very nice description of our application and why it was chosen. The winner of this category, incidentally, was Coda from Panic, a beautiful program that is also used for building websites (but geared to a much more technical audience than Sandvox). Congratulations to all the winners; it's certainly worthwhile for all Mac users to look at the full list of awards and try out the applications.

Sandvox Version 1.2.1 is Released

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 01:02:13 -0700

There's a minor update to Sandvox available now, bringing it up to version 1.2.1. There are a number of bugfixes, plus some really nice performance enhancements we were able to put into place.

As a minor update, it's not about new features, but improvements. One feature we do want to mention is a subtle anti-spam trick that we have put into the Contact form (page or pagelet) that will discourage you from receiving spam from automated contact form "bots." You will probably want to take advantage of this; just open your site document and re-publish it.

This coming week, we will be at WWDC, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, picking up new development tricks and rubbing elbows with other Mac developers. In between sessions, we'll be putting the finishing touches on our new website (still built with Sandvox, of course) for an imminent launch. For those reading this who are attending the conference, we hope you'll say hi if you run into us! (Dan will be twittering!) Terrence will also be there; as will Mike Abdullah (our newest engineer) who has crossed the Atlantic from the UK to attend his first WWDC.

Karelia is switching web hosts

Fri, 25 May 2007 14:12:22 -0700

This week would have been a great week for Karelia in getting new Mac users aware of Sandvox — an interview with Dan was featured on this week's Macworld Podcast. But Murphy of "Murphy's Law" decided to visit the company that Karelia has been using for web hosting services, and because of that, our website and web-based services were out of commission for three separate occasions this last week.

From time to time, a website is bound to have some "down" time. But the amount of time a website is down should be measured in minutes or at worst hours per year, not *days*. And that's just what happened to us. We had very slow response time from from their technical support in resolving the issues.

Having our own website down is certainly an inconvenience for us; we clearly lost some potential Sandvox users because a cryptic message appeared in place of our site for half of this last week. But what's especially frustrating for us, and for many Sandvox users, is the outage of our "services" domain which handles certain special tasks and provides content for many Sandvox-built websites, including contact-form processing, page view counters, Amazon.com wish lists, and RSS feed relays.

To those Sandvox users and visitors to Sandvox-built websites who noticed problems accessing these components of your website, we apologize humbly and pledge to find a new web host that provides us (and indirectly, these other websites) a higher availability — and a faster response time to dealing with the occasional problems that Mr. Murphy brings from time to time.

Sandvox is One Year Old

Wed, 16 May 2007 11:36:04 -0700

One year ago today, we released the first version of Sandvox. That means that Sandvox is a year old! Just a toddler by human standards, but in internet years, like dog years, Sandvox is an active kid, already at version 1.2 and, in a few weeks, version 1.2.1. My how you've grown!

Back in our secret labs, we're already starting to work on some new features and updates for the next major version. We have learned a lot about what our users want, and so we are re-building a few components of Sandvox "from the ground up."

Thanks very much to our vibrant community of Sandvox users who have made this a happy birthday indeed!

Sandvox 1.2 Released

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:10:39 -0700

Right on the heels of our recent 1.1.2 release, we've just shipped version 1.2 of Sandvox.

We're very excited about this release. We've collected several of the top feature requests from the Sandvox community and incorporated them into version 1.2.

Probably the biggest of these is the ability to customize selected designs by easily substituting your own graphics for the default banner image. We've also added a bunch of new designs to version 1.2, bringing our total count of bundled designs to 43. Eleven of these now have swappable banners.

This release also has four new pagelets that we've been testing, and we think you'll be pleased with the results. For your site visitors who don't use a brower like Safari that informs them that an RSS feed is available for your blog, we have a RSS badge pagelet to do just that job. If you want your friends to know when you are available for iChat or Skype, there's a pagelet for that. Another pagelet puts links to one of our favorite online shopping sites into your sidebar—you have to see this pagelet to believe it. We've also implemented our most-requested feature: a page-view counter. Now you can display (with a number of fun prebuilt styles) how many times a page has been viewed on your website.

We've added some properties to pages in response to user requests. One is a "draft" mode to prevent a page from being uploaded until it is ready. Another is an alternate title for a page, typically shorter, to be used only in site menus.

Our Pro users have submitted a variety of requests, and we've incorporated several in version 1.2. Want to edit HTML in a window larger than that little inspector? Done! HTML editors now have their own separate, resizable window complete with Search & Replace and syntax coloring, allowing you to edit the contents of your Raw HTML pages and pagelets in style and with greater ease. You can also open any chunk of editable text (for example, the body of a Text page or the footer of your website) and directly edit that HTML as well.

Another new Pro feature is an expansion of a capability we introduced in previous versions: Code Injection. We've identified four spots on your website's pages where you might want to insert HTML, JavaScript, or PHP/Scripting code. Previous versions of Sandvox allowed you to inject before the <html> output and within the <head> area; now we also support hooks for the <body> tag and right before the </body> tag.

The final Pro feature that bears mentioning is our integration with Google's Webmaster tools, including Google SiteMaps, and Google Analytics. The codes that Google supplies can now be entered in the new Google inspector, and you can select an option to have a Google sitemap automatically generated and maintained for you.

Many other features (and bugfixes) are listed in the full release notes. We're looking forward to seeing some of the amazing new sites our users create, and hope you'll let us know when you have your Sandvox site published. (You can send us a note with our built-in feedback reporter, or tag your site with 'svxsite' if you are a del.icio.us user.)

Enjoy!

Sandvox 1.1.2 Released

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:42:37 -0700

Today we are releasing Sandvox 1.1.2, a bug-fix and optimization update to Sandvox. The release notes provide the details, but in short: we've fixed a lot of issues. The feedback from our beta testers over the last several weeks has been very positive, and we believe the Sandvox community at large will be happy with this update.

And now, onto the next update!

Blueball releases new Sandvox design

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 10:45:08 -0700

Third-party companies have been working on new Sandvox designs, and we're pleased to share the news that Blueball Design recently announced the availability of their first Sandvox design, "Blueball Pro Tabs." We've had a number of users create designs for their own sites, but Blueball is the first with a full commercial release of a new design.

Unlike our built-in Sandvox designs, which assume that the main content area is 800 pixels wide, the Blueball design comes with a 1000-pixel-wide variation. We're looking forward to more designs from Blueball and other companies, and yes, we'll continue to add new built-in designs to Sandvox, too!

SVDesignMiner Released

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:07:19 -0800

We love it when new utility applications are created to work with existing applications. An example of this is newly-released SVDesignMiner from To•The•Point Software. It browses the Sandvox designs on your system and makes it easy to duplicate an existing design and start modifying it to your tastes.

It doesn't hide the CSS files from you to make minor adjustments; that is an entirely different ballgame. But if what you want to do is tweak a design, especially the graphic elements that make up an existing design, this could be a useful tool!

By the way, a couple of other companies will be releasing their own custom Sandvox designs. If you are looking for some designs that go beyond the forty or so available from Karelia, you may want to give those a try. We'll mention them here when they go online.

Now Available: Version 1.1.

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 11:10:10 -0800

Just a few hours ago, we updated Sandvox to 1.1 and made it live on our website! For all existing users of Sandvox, we recommend that you update to this version.

We've listened to the avalanche of feedback and requests from the community of Sandvox users and think that you will find the updates since the 1.0 release compelling!

We've mentioned in previous weblog entries what this new release is about. Our focus has been stability; we have rewritten some of Sandvox's internals from the ground up in order to make the program solid and reliable. We've made a huge number of bugfixes to which even the release notes cannot do justice. And there are some nice new features as well, including:

• Eight gorgeous new site designs

• A comprehensive and completely integrated Help, including step-by-step "How do I...?" pages that explore the many features of Sandvox

• Localization to Italian and Simplified Chinese languages

• A snapshot feature to cleanly save your work in progress

• Greatly improved Flash file support

For anybody who signed up for our email alert list, you will be receiving a message soon (if not already) mentioning that we have also updated our 5-pack of bonus designs, along with a download URL. Just in case anybody has these designs and is no longer on our email alert list, it's probably a good idea to sign up on our website so you can get the new 1.1 version of these bonus designs. (There are many compatibility fixes, including for IE7).

Sandvox 1.1 is coming soon, really!

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:09:47 -0800

We had no idea it would take so long to get version 1.1 out the door. We are just now releasing our eighth official beta version of 1.1, and we feel like we are getting closer to having it good enough for a general audience. There is such a difference between the current 1.1 version and the released 1.0.4 in terms of stability; we think Sandvox users will be pleased.

Once we get 1.1 out the door, we are anxious to begin work on version 1.5, for which we have plans for some new pagelets and page types, rich text options, new HTML hooks for Pro users, and so forth. We have received your many suggestions; now we just need to actually build them.

What are we up to?

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:02:05 -0700

We're still here! Our collective noses have been "to the grindstone" for much longer than we would have preferred. At WWDC, we got hold of a number of techniques for solving some bugs and crashes that have been dogging a small number of Sandvox users, but it has taken a while to actually fix everything!

So we are getting pretty close to having a new release for you all. Some of the crashes and bugs we have been able to fix:

Database access crashes

iMedia crashes from accessing certain images and movies

Slowness in loading images

Problems with editing text, especially in Japanese

The bonus of waiting so long is that we have been able to get a few more goodies bundled into the application, such as several new designs, integrated Help, and two new languages.

We hope to get the new version out in a couple of weeks. We really want this to be the most stable release ever. Your patience is appreciated!

WWDC Wrap-Up

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:31:50 -0700

Last week, the entire Karelia development team took a break from our normal routine to attend Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). This is Apple's annual big event for its developers, where we get a peek at Apple's plans for their operating system, learn new technologies, and schmooze with other developers and Apple engineers. It was great to get some one-on-one time with members of the Core Data, QuickTime, and WebKit teams to solve some particularly tricky issues. Without (hopefully) violating our NDA, there are some major improvements in Leopard and Xcode 3 that we can take advantage of today to debug Sandvox while still deploying the application for Tiger. We are excited! It was also a great time to step back and be inspired by Apple's forthcoming "Leopard" technlogies and then brainstorm new ideas for Sandvox and even future products (working hard to stay out of Apple's way of course).

The conference was a first for us: the first time that the three engineers working on Sandvox were actually in the same place at the same time. We commemorated that with a photo next to a gigantic new MacPro.

Of course, now we're all back in our distributed offices again, hard at work on version 1.0.5 of Sandvox and beyond….

Has it really been a month?

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 17:15:12 -0700

It's hard to believe a month has gone by since our last posting here and our last release. Tonight we are releasing version 1.0.3 of Sandvox, so it's probably a good idea to put a little note about what we are up to.

This last month has been focused mostly on bugfixes. We keep squishing them, but we find new ones in other places! We did finally manage to add a few more localizations of Sandvox to the mix, so now along with English and the French that Ronald Leroux provided, we have Traditional Chinese (thanks to Jack M. H. Lin), Danish (thanks to Mogens Thyregod), and Japanese (thanks to Daisuke Okada and Hiroto Sawane). It's extremely gratifying to see Sandvox running in other languages, especially the non-European ones that none of us here can make out at all!

Going forward, we are preparing for Apple's WWDC — their annual developer conference, where we get to hobnob with fellow developers and helpful Apple engineers. There will be three of us Karelians attending (Dan, Terrence, and Greg). While it unfortunately it brings development to a halt for the week, we have the opportunity to learn so much about current and forthcoming Apple technologies, it's all worth it.

In the mean time, as we continue to fix bugs and deal with problems that arise for current users (for another ".01" release in a short while), we are also mapping out what features to put into a version 1.1 update. We have collected hundreds of great suggestions from our users, and we have a few surprise ideas up our sleeves, so we expect the 1.1 release later this year to be well-received.