The Karelia Blog | Karelia Software

Sandvox 2.5

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:17:17 +0000

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!

Come visit Karelia at Macworld|iWorld!

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:18:43 +0000

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

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:51:54 +0000

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

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:45:19 +0000

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

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:58:07 +0000

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

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:13:13 +0100

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!

Mon, 09 May 2011 04:51:10 +0100

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!

iMedia Browser 2.0.1 is now available!

Fri, 06 May 2011 17:44:08 +0100

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.

State of the Media: iMedia 2 Now Available

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:41:50 +0000

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.

Guest Post: It's Good To Be Newb

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 02:55:21 +0100

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?".

Handling error messages when your SFTP server changes

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:26:06 +0100

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, …

Sandvox 1.6.7

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:08:58 +0100

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

Tue, 04 May 2010 15:09:55 +0100

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.)

Video training for Sandvox is coming soon

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:31:14 +0100

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

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:07:30 +0000

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.

Download iMedia Browser.