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Sandvox 2.5
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Sandvox 2.5 is here today!
Yes, indeed, quite the special occasion. So what's new?
Lion
With the release of Mac OS X Lion, Apple gave us developers an exciting new set of features to adopt:
If it suits you, Sandvox can run as a full-screen app for distraction-free writing; just click the little full-screen button at the top-right of the window.
While working, there's no need for the “Save” command any more; Lion takes care of all that for you. You can quit at any time and the next time you launch, Sandvox will pop back up exactly as you left it. Furthermore it's easy to look over the past revisions of your site from the built-in versions browser.
Note that as part of our move to adopt these new features, Sandvox 2.5 now requires Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) or later. Don't worry if you're still on Leopard (10.5), we'll continue to support you, with Sandvox 2.2.5 out shortly for a variety of bug fixes.
Slide Show
This is a feature we hope you'll find some great uses for! As an alternative to a photo grid, the slide show is a nice easy way to cycle through a collection of photos. We've provided a variety of transition effects, along with control over various other details. I think the demo above rather speaks for itself!
Sharing
Let's say you've just a published an update to your website. What do you want to do next? Why, tell the world of course! So we added a sheet at the end of publishing, making it easy for you to share the news using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or good ol' email.
And don't forget, we're at Macworld|iWorld this week, showing off 2.5, so come stop by if you get a chance.
Come visit Karelia at Macworld|iWorld!
Karelia Software will have a small booth at the upcoming Macworld|iWorld exposition in San Francisco, next week: January 26-28, 2012.
Come visit! We will be at booth 228-027, against the left wall at Moscone West, in the OSX Zone, the hippest part of the expo floor!
Not to pre-announce anything, but we just might have a new version of Sandvox to demonstrate to passers-by….
Sandvox 2.2.1
As promised, Sandvox 2.2.1 restores Delicious List compatibility with Delicious.com. Of course it also contains a variety of bug fixes. On top of that, I thought I'd take the time to note one little security enhancement we've slipped in:
When publishing using SFTP, each server has its own host key. Each time you connect to such a server, your Mac stores a copy of that key. Then, when you reconnect, your copy of the host key can be compared against the server's. If they're different it could be because someone is maliciously trying to get you to connect to a different server! It could also be that your hosting provider has needed to do some maintenance which caused the key to change.
So, as of Sandvox 2.2.1, if this happens you'll be greeted with something like:
Whereupon you should contact your hosting provider to make sure the change was caused by them, before accepting the new host key.
For details on the bug fixes in this update, see the full release notes.
Delicious.com
Recently, Delicious.com has moved to new ownership, and as a consequence, our Delicious List object has stopped working. We've just figured out how to get it working again, but for the meantime please accept our apologies. The new 2.2.1 update, which we hope to get released as soon as it's approved by the Mac App Store folks, should get things back in shape again.
Sandvox 2.2
Yesterday we released Sandvox 2.2. It's quite a big update and we're pretty excited about it! So what's new? Let's take a quick tour of the highlights:
Well, first up, we have a great new Map object. Perfect for advertising the location of your business, or where an event is taking place. It's powered by Google Maps, so should be plenty familiar to most visitors. I've popped an example in below:
You know you want some tasty, tasty ice cream…
Our second major feature has been quite some coming, and oft-requested, albeit not terribly glamourous — list editing! Sandvox 2.2 features a brand new Text Inspector giving you full control over list indenting and numbering:
The HTML Editor has gotten some love, gaining indentation controls (use the same menu items as for lists), and a Tidy HTML feature.
We also play a little nicer with Lion now, respecting your setting under: "System Preferences → General → Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps"
That's the major highlights; more can be found in the full release notes!
Lion and Safari compatibility update
Last week saw a raft of updates and new releases from Apple. We thought we'd take a quick moment to fill you in on where Sandvox stands with them.
Sandvox 2
The great news is that Sandvox 2 runs on Leopard, Snow Leopard, and now Lion. We released version 2.1.4 on Saturday, fixing a couple of bugs, and improving compatibility with Lion. You can grab it using the Check for Updates menu from within Sandvox, or download directly from our website. We recommend everyone update, especially Lion users.
As Lion brings many new features for apps like Sandvox to use, and we hope to integrate them in a future update. We'll keep you posted.
At just about the same time as Lion, Apple also released Safari 5.1 for Snow Leopard. This updates not only the Safari app, but also the WebKit framework which Sandvox is built atop of. We're seeing a few reports that suggest video playback isn't as stable as before, and are looking into it.
Sandvox 1
We found that for many customers, the Safari update stops Sandvox 1 from ever finishing launching. Fortunately, Sandvox 1.6.9 is here to help, bringing compatibility with Lion and Safari 5.1 on Snow Leopard. Again, update using the Check for Updates menu, or download directly from our website.
At last...Sandvox 2.0 has arrived!
After many months of intense work and debate, we are pleased and exhausted to unveil Sandvox 2.0. This version represents a huge leap forward in Sandvox's development. It makes website creation easier and faster, and gives Sandvox users more flexibility than ever before.
Our customers' input has been invaluable: As Sandvox has evolved, our users haven't been shy about telling us what works, what doesn't, what other tools they'd like to have, and how we could make their website creation simpler yet more sophisticated.
Saying that Sandvox 2.0 features "more than five dozen new features and major improvements" is true, but also something of an understatement. What's under the hood is just as important—if not more—than the changes you'll see in the user interface.
Thanks largely to Mike Abdullah's efforts, Sandvox 2.0 introduces a completely new architecture and editing engine. What this means in real terms is that Sandvox users can now mix and match content "objects" in more ways than ever. Want to include text, photography, and video on the same page? No problem. And that's just for starters. We're rolling out more than 20 of these flexible objects, including Facebook and Twitter, and more are in the works, from us as well as third-party developers!
The latest version of the Karelia iMedia Browser is built into Sandvox 2.0, so finding all that content to mix and match will be that much easier.
We've expanded the options for adding Raw HTML with the redesigned Raw HTML object, which handles direct placement, including live resizing, of any HTML, JavaScript, PHP, or other inserted code, including those popular embed codes provided by YouTube, Vimeo, and other audio and video content sites.
Rest assured we didn't forget the fun, so Sandvox 2.0 also features a completely new design chooser and new color variations for popular designs. Want even more customization options? A redesigned Inspector really opens up the power of Sandvox, letting you selectively apply and adjust features and modify objects in a very intuitive way.
Sandvox 2.0 sites now automatically support HTML5 and jQuery. Comment support has been expanded to include Disqus, IntenseDebate, and Facebook Comments, making conversation on your Sandvox blogs easier and more robust.
Our launch of Sandvox 2.0 also heralds the end of separate Regular and Pro editions. We've decided that Sandvox can help everyone become a Pro—or at least create a website like one—so every copy of Sandvox is now fully featured.
So what's all this going to cost?
As small business owners, we know the importance of keeping an eye on the bottom line and not letting expenses run amok. With that in mind, and since Day 1, we've provided free updates to licensed users.
Sandvox 2.0, however, is far more than an update. It's a major upgrade, and it represents more than two years of work. Accordingly, if you are moving up from a previous version of Sandvox, we are charging an upgrade fee.
For a limited time, Sandvox 2.0 will be priced at US$67 (regularly US$77), and upgrades are introductory priced at US$37 (regularly US$47), through May 20, 2011.
If you recently purchased Sandvox, don't fret: Anyone who purchased Sandvox after January 5, 2011 is eligible to receive a free upgrade. We'll notify you automatically by email.
New licenses and upgrades are all available directly from us by visiting the Karelia Store.
Welcome to the new world of Sandvox 2: we hope you love it just as much as we do!
iMedia Browser 2.0.1 is now available!
We are pleased to announce that our iMedia Browser has just been updated to version 2.0.1. This free update is now available through the Mac App Store.
Although this looks like a minor update, it's not. (We had considered calling it 2.1 but it was too late in the Mac App Store submission process to change our minds!) This version continues to build upon the new 2.0 architecture which we introduced in January of this year.
In addition to some bug fixes and minor improvements, there are some nice, new features to point out:
The iPhoto Browser now has full support for Faces and Events (complete with skimming previews)! This is a really great way to see your iPhoto library right alongside any app.
We've also put in Faces support when browsing Aperture libraries.
If you use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 — or, what everybody outside Adobe just calls Lightroom — you'll be happy to know that we've added support for Lightroom's Collection Groups.
Finally, we squeezed in a few usability improvements to the Flickr browser.
We also don't mind saying that the iMedia Browser app wouldn't be what it is without the great community of developers who contribute to its underlying open-source framework. We would especially like to thank Jörg Jacobsen of Jacobsen Software Engineering and Sven Betzold of Ifolor AG in Switzerland for their major contributions to these recent additions to the iMedia framework.
And, don't forget, all of these new features will show up automatically in Sandvox 2, set to be released next week!
State of the Media: iMedia 2 Now Available
Today we are pleased to announce iMedia Browser 2, available, for free, exclusively on the Mac App Store.
Work on iMedia 2 started a couple of summers ago when a group of developers got together for lunch at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and mapped out what we all wanted for the next big version. From there, Peter Baumgartner of Boinx Software really spearheaded development so that he could include it in the next version of FotoMagico.
iMedia 2 is a huge rewrite, with many aspects re-written from the ground up. The big goal for iMedia 2 was to make it much, much faster. We did this by making the browser load media as "lazily" as possible, meaning that no time is spent loading anything until it is really needed for display. Access to your media libraries should now be a lot faster.
iMedia 2 also browses large collections of media asynchronously, again keeping the interface fast and responsive. We were even able to do this over the Internet with the included Flickr Browser that's now part of the Photos module.
The Flickr Browser is really amazing. It's so easy now to just search for photos on Flickr. If the photo is marked as "downloadable," you can just grab it and drag the thumbnail to your application; iMedia 2 will grab and download the large-size version for you. (Use the contextual menu — control-click — to see important attribution information for the photo. Check those copyrights!)
iMedia 2 also introduces the ability to switch between different views of your media. iMedia 1 limited you to either a fixed grid of images or a list of titles. iMedia 2 expands this to include a new combination view, a list with both a thumbnail and a description of the item.
QuickLook is also integrated into iMedia Browser 2: just hit the spacebar to bring up a slideshow of your selection.
iMedia Browser 2 is a standalone app that's a useful addition to the toolbox of any Mac user.
But what's great is that the core technology of iMedia Browser 2 is also an open-source Cocoa framework that we at Karelia Software developed originally for use in our own award-winning application, Sandvox. SInce then, the open-source iMedia framework has been incorporated into more than a dozen popular Mac apps. The new iMedia 2 core framework has already been incorporated into Boinx's FotoMagico, Red Sweater's MarsEdit, Zykloid's Posterino, and Early Innovation's PhotoLinker. (Don't worry, we plan on incorporating iMedia 2 into a future version of Sandvox, of course!)
We continue to be thrilled and humbled by the community effort that's developed around the iMedia 2 framework. We greatly appreciate the contributions of the many developers who have offered their time, advice, and code in the iMedia 2 effort, none more so than the whole Boinx team, especially Peter Baumgartner. iMedia 2 simply could not have come about without Peter's amazing work. Thank you Peter!
So, what are you waiting for? Download iMedia Browser today! And if you like it, be sure to rate it and review it!
Guest Post: It's Good To Be Newb
We'd like to thank Suzanne Boben of 11Mystics, one our latest third-party designers to offer their own Sandvox designs, for contributing this lesson in overcoming "newb" tribulation when it comes to Sandvox.
Hello folks. My name is Suzanne and that's right, I'm a newb. That's newb as in newbie, new to Sandvox. Ah, the pains of having no clue, of asking stupid questions and of bothering everyone around until their ears fall off. Some may dread this embarrassing phase of the learning curve. It certainly isn't the most pleasant part of the process. But just as a moth builds strength breaking out of its caccoon, so too does the Sandvox beginner. One might argue, when you are new, you have the greatest potential to reach the peaks.
For the last six weeks I've been digging deep into the Sandvox architecture, learning what it can do and how it does it. In the process, I've discovered much... the well-traveled avenues, a few interesting dark corners and some entirely unexplored pathways. All of this, of course, feeds my design work - a workable mishmash of the status quo and the surprisingly unconventional. When you're new, you don't have limits wrapped around your experience, you don't assume "no". In fact the opposite is true. Your frame of reference is firmly rooted in "how?".
As I've completed my initial designs, I've also fleshed-out a kind of stable design framework that will ensure consistency, accuracy and speed of development. This is a natural by-product of being new. You hate to make the same mistakes twice. Why not create a framework with all of your wisdom built-in? Makes sense. But the problem here is that we all tend to become complacent when we're not challenged to think any longer. We give credence to quantity and overlook the fact that, within that underlying framework of efficiency, lies potential we've long forgotten.
I'd like to encourage the Sandvox community to revisit its newbie roots. Stop assuming "no" and start asking "how". Some of what we discover will fuel further development of the application. Other aspects will inspire designers to expand the boundaries of the designs. In all cases, we give permission to the clueless newbie within each of us, to demand something better, something more intuitive, something more fun.
Now, with all that said, I have a few tidbits to share that I found noteworthy as a newb. Some of you probably know all this, but even if you do, give it some consideration and ask if you've truly exhausted the potential that's sitting there for you.
Sandvox Pro versus Sandvox
If you've read any of my commentary in the Yahoo group, you know I believe Sandvox Pro is the version you should be using... that is, if you ever want to have anything your way. No design will ever suite your desires entirely, but having the ability to use the Site/Page Code Injection feature and the ability to edit raw HTML is by far worth the extra $49 it costs for a pro license, especially if you're managing a business website. These two features allow you to tweak a design with relatively little effort and I'm certain any third-party designer would be happy to help you with the tweaks should you ask. The barriers to having a design your way are much greater in your mind than they are in reality so consider Sandvox Pro and then start asking "how".
HTML Is Not The Monster Under Your Bed
Following my sentiments from above, I would love to encourage some of you less-technical folks to embrace a little knowledge of HTML. For many, the mythical nature of the acronym itself is enough for you to say "no". But suspend your judgement for a moment. HTML is not "code". It's nothing more than "mark-up". What's mark-up? Well, it's a set of what we call tags, that we wrap around your text to indicate to a browser how to display the text. There are a few basic tags for things like headings, blockquotes, lists or tables that, if you knew them, could extend the potential of your website. Don't use the Format menu to color and size your text. Just wrap a heading in one of the HTML headings. Any quality Sandvox design will have embedded styles for these HTML elements so that, when you use them, the resulting display of your content will beautifully match the design itself.
If you view any of my design demos, you will see that I have taken great care to style HTML elements to match the designs. This is a huge benefit to those who take a little time to learn how to make use of them.
Photo Pagelets versus Rich Text Pagelets with Photos
Working with a handful of you these past two weeks has been very helpful. Designers and developers understand how things function and therefore have a somewhat sterile view of how an application should be used. We tend to miss the fact that the non-technical mind uses the app in very different ways. One such situation I discovered was the use of photo pagelets to display products where the product name, product description, product price and add to cart buttons were inserted into the photo caption field.
This worked. But this was never the intended use of a photo pagelet, and therefore the design did not sufficiently support the use case. As I sat here, intrigued by it all, it then crossed my mind, "Why aren't you using a rich text pagelet? Those allow you to insert images too, and then you have significantly more flexibility for styling the product name, description, price and add to cart button." Neither of us had even considered this until the problem was revealed through the design. So, the moral of the story on this one is, don't assume you can't do complex things within pagelets. The rich text pagelet and the HTML pagelet will let you do just about anything.
Sidebar Sitemaps
What? Indeed! This is a strange little accident I stumbled into the other day. It's not a perfect solution as sub-pages are not linked, but it is possible to have a two-level site map displayed in a pagelet. This also requires that your top-level pages are "Sorted Title" collections and not collections with textual summaries. In Sandvox, select your home page and then add a collection index pagelet. In the inspector, drag the red target onto your home page to indicate the index should be top level for your site. Next uncheck the box entitled Maximum. Next, check the box entitled Summaries. This will reveal any sub-pages beneath your top-level pages. If any of your top-level pages are summary collections, the text will appear rather than the list of sub-pages. If the design you're using has done a good job of styling pagelet lists, you should now see what looks like a site map hierarchy. Hopefully that little trick might make someone happy.
RSS Feed Page or Pagelet
Did you know the RSS Feed page and RSS Feed pagelet let you display a list of articles from someone else's website? Perhaps you run an information site that has ties to other sites providing similar information. It might be very helpful to display a list of their articles with this widget. It does require that the other site have and RSS feed, but most quality news and information sites do these days. Just grab the feed URL, enter it into Sandvox's RSS Feed widget and there you go - instant extension of value to your readers.
Photo and Video Arrays Using Pagelets
Here's another trick I discovered when I was styling photo and video pagelets for my designs. It's one thing to add a photo to your sidebar, but what about a photo array of 2 or more photos with only one title at the top of the array? All you need to do here is add, for example, three photo pagelets, set the photos for each pagelet, then erase the title for the second and third pagelets. You can provide captions for all three if you want. Now you have three photo pagelets that *appear* to be grouped together under one title at the top. You can find examples of this in any of my design demos. Note that if you add borders to the pagelets, the array won't look as uniform.
Handling error messages when your SFTP server changes
We recently got an inquiry about what to do when the server that you are connecting to for uploading your website with SFTP has changed. SFTP is a secure file transfer method, much better than FTP, that uses your mac's SSH system to encrypt the data (and login information) that it uploads.
In order for SSH to be sure that your Mac is really talking to the same server computer, and that there isn't another computer impersonating the computer you were expecting to be talking to — this is called a "man in the middle attack" — your Mac stores a "signature" of the server, when you first connected to it. If that signature has changed — usually it's legitimate, such as when the server's computer is upgraded — then you will not be able to connect with SFTP. If you look at the publishing transcript from Sandvox (from the Help menu), you will see a warning something like this:
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
The RSA host key for … has changed, …
Of course this problem isn't specific to Sandvox, or even SFTP. Any connection over SSH ("Secure Shell") will show this message if the server has changed. (See this forum post and this forum post for other examples of people having this kind of problem.)
Of course you do want to realize that the warning is there for a reason. It's probably a good idea to get in touch with your Internet host and tell them about the issue. Chances are very high that they will have a good explanation, and that it is not the case that somebody is trying to break into your connection and crack your website! But it's a good idea to be watchful just the same.
As those forum posts point out, the solution is to get rid of the old signature, so that your Mac no longer remembers the server's information. When you then connect for the next time, it will remember this new signature.
If you are adept at the command line, you can probably find and edit (or delete) the file quickly. Since Mac users are not supposed to need the command line, however, this is how to do it.
In the Finder, Choose Go to Folder… from the Go menu.
Type or paste this (tilde, forward slash, period, ssh) into the input field: ~/.ssh
Click the Go button.
Now you will be viewing the contents of the ".ssh" folder in your home folder. (It's normally a hidden folder.)
The quickest thing to do is to just drag the file "known_hosts" into the trash. However, that will forget the signatures of all the servers you have connected to. So a more refined method would be to delete just the signature that is affected. Here's how to do that.
Drag the "known_hosts" file into the icon for TextEdit. (Or, control-click/right-click on the icon and choose Open With ▶ TextEdit.) If you have a preferred text editor like BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, etc., feel free to use that instead!
Don't Panic! This file is not meant to be read by mere mortals, so it's going to look like junk. Look for the host name that you are trying to replace — the server that was giving you trouble. It will be at the beginning of a line.
Triple-click to select that entire line — the host followed by the unreadable stuff. Delete that line.
Save the file.
Now you should be able to connect to the host!
Sandvox 1.6.7
We are pleased to announce the availability of Sandvox 1.6.7 for download.
This is a minor update, though it should make a lot of users (or potential users) happy. We recommend that everybody using Sandvox update to this new version.
Feel free to check out the full release notes here. While this new version will be helpful for nearly everybody in solving a few annoyances, it should be most appreciated by users of other languages, particularly non-Roman, right-to-left languages.
Video Training for Sandvox Now Available
Today we're pleased to announce the general availability of a new product to supplement our Sandvox website builder. It's a screencast training course, divided into nineteen chapters and clocking in at a total running time of two and a half hours.
We started this project late last year, building upon some of the topical screencasts we had been creating every so often. We heard from a lot of our customers that they were looking for a tutorial approach to learning, so we embarked on this project.
Little did we know how much work it was going to be! The writing and organization of the course and "shooting" script, the actual creation and editing of the screencasts, the fancy title sequence, processing and saving the movie files, packaging up the DVD for production and making the videos available online have all been a lot of work. We (and/or the folks we hired to help us) couldn't have done it without tools like ScreenFlow for the actual screen capture, After Effects for the title sequence, Box Shot 3D for the nice images of the DVD and case, Acorn for various graphics, Apple's Pages for layout of the DVD cover art and the transcripts of the course, and SimpleMovieX for batch conversion of videos. (Actually we're doing some last-minute exports so that the videos will be viewable on the iPad. Please stay tuned if you are having issues watching the movies on your iPad.)
We're pretty proud of the end result, and the early feedback we've received has been largely positive. We hope that this optional add-on training will be useful to a lot of Sandvox users.
Video training for Sandvox is coming soon
We're about to launch a product that we've been working on for quite a while. It's a nineteen-part video screencast training course for Sandvox. If you've been following our twitter feed, you might have heard us drop a few hints about it. The few people we've shown it to have been very pleased with what they saw; we think it will be a "must-have" for Sandvoxers who really want to take advantage of this simple yet powerful application.
If you're interested, be sure you are signed up on our email newsletter list; there will be a special deal announced only for members of that list very soon.
The training course will be available to members of the public in the first week of May.
iMedia Browser updated for Aperture 3 Support
Thanks to the contributions of Houdah Software to the open-source component of our iMedia Browser application, we are pleased to announce an update to version 1.2.2 of this free utility that brings compatibility with Apple's Aperture 3 — both in browsing photos and movies.
This new version also fixes a couple of other minor issues that were affecting only a few users.