The Karelia Blog | Karelia Software

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Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:43:53 -0800

Over in an obscure corner of our website, we've set up a separate blog that is really written for fellow "indie" mac developers — in other words, other small Mac software developer shops like Karelia, with just a few (or even one) person.

Most of what we've written there is not really intended for the same audience as this general Karelia blog. However, from time to time, there may be some useful tidbits that we think our general readership might find useful, especially those that have, like us, a small business.

A recent post we did is called "A Comparison of 16 Bulk Email Marketing Services", and it might be useful to you if you have a small business or organization that needs to build a list of friends, clients, and customers, to send them announcements from time to time. (Doing this is often called "permission marketing.")

From that post you can find a links to some other articles along that topic that might interest you. Just substitute whatever it is your company does for the software business that we are talking about.

Enjoy!

Sandvox 1.6.6 Tweaks Search Engine Friendliness

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:02:54 -0800

We've just updated Sandvox to version 1.6.6. This is primarily a maintenance update, with fixes to a few problems that people have reported over the last few months.

The one new feature we wanted to point out is a subtle change in how file names are created. After reading a blog post by Google spokesperson Matt Cutts, we decided that it would be better for our automatically generated file names to use dashes, not underscores, to separate words. At least, this is how it will work for newly created, unpublished pages.

Here's how it works: Let's say you give your page a title like "Sandvox 1.6.6 Tweaks Search Engine Friendliness." Sandvox will automatically come up with a name for that post, based on the title of the post, by stripping out non-alphanumeric characters and substituting spaces for dashes, and truncating if the file name is going to be very long. (Sandvox wants to make sure that its files can be uploaded to just about any server, so even if your web host could handle longer names or other characters in the file name, it's better to be on the safe side.

In older versions of Sandvox, the file name would become something like "sandvox_166_tweaks_search_e.html", but in the new version, the file name will be "sandvox-166-tweaks-search-e.html". It's easier to type, and apparently easier for Google to extract the individual words from.

This file name shows up in the page details area in the lower left corner of the document window. You are free to override this title if you want — we did that for this page so that the more important words "search engine" are in there and the less important word "tweaks" is not. Note that once you explicitly override the automatically-generated title, or once you publish the page to your web host, the title will no longer change even if you change the title of your post.

What's important to notice is that Sandvox does not change the automatically generated file titles for any existing pages or collections. This is extremely important. Once your website is published, there is a good chance that somebody is linking to the pages on your website. It's not a good idea to be changing the file title — from which the URL is derived — on any already-published page.

If you really want your already-published pages to use dashes instead of underscores, you are welcome to change the file names and re-publish your website, but please be aware of the consequences. There may be links to your old page URLs, and if you don't delete the old files from your web host, you may end up with your old page still on your server, plus your newly-renamed page as well. That's a big mess, and you should avoid that! (If you are using Apache, you can probably get clever with .htaccess files and "Redirect" directives, but this is not for the faint of heart!

Most people will not even notice or care about this change. We just wanted to do as close to the "right thing" as possible going forward.

Indie+Relief coming on January 20

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:39:45 -0800

A few days ago, Fellow developer Justin Williams of Second Gear Software came up with a great idea to raise some money to help the victims of last week's earthquake in Haiti.

It's called "Indie+Relief." Over 125 software companies are participating, making more than 200 Mac applications available. The deal is that any software you buy from this list of participating titles on Wednesday, January 20, will result in a donation of the full amount to a charitable organization helping out in Haiti.

Like many of the participating companies, we are choosing Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) as the organization we will be supporting. We are hoping to raise several thousand dollars for this Nobel-Prize-winning organization.

Please stop by the Indie+Relief website on January 20 and purchase some of the many awesome titles listed there. (And if you don't need anything from that list — or you can't think of anybody you could give a gift to — please make a direct donation to one of the participating charities.)

New Sandvox Tips PDF for FaceBook Fans

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:29:45 -0800

We've created an eBook (PDF book) called "One Hundred and Something Tips and Tricks for Sandvox" for fans of our new Karelia Software Page on Facebook and it's already being called a "MUST READ for all Sandvox users."

We're sure you're on Facebook, right? Come by and make yourself a "fan" of Karelia Software, and download this eBook!

Oh, and while you are there, we hope you'll make a note on our Facebook "wall." Really, we won't mind! Upload a picture of you showing off your Sandvox website, or with whatever your website is about!

Adding Site-wide Search in Sandvox Pro

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:49:29 -0800

The Sandvox Yahoo! group recently discussed adding a form to one's Sandvox website to enable visitors to search the site.

For a website to have its own truly built-in search function, it would have to have its own index of the contents of the website. That's beyond the scope of this article, though it could be set up by somebody who is handy with working with the "back end" of a website by installing a search engine like the open-source DataparkSearch like we do for our documentation website, or one of the many commercial search engines around there.

For most Sandvox Pro users, on the other hand, it's actually easy to add a form for searching the website by using some other company's index of your website. Many of these have free options, or paid options if you don't want to show their advertisements.

There are several that we've found: Google Custom Search (or Google Site Search, which is geared toward larger businesses), PicoSearch, FreeFind, and FusionBot, to name a few. These will provide a form that you can paste into your website (as a Raw HTML pagelet in Sandvox); searchers will get their list of results from your website.

Be sure when you are creating the form that you specify a compact width, so that it will fit in the 200 pixels width of most pagelets on Sandvox sites.

Karelia Announces Sandvox Black Friday Sale, with a twist

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:17:32 -0800

The day after Thanksgiving in the United States has come to be known as Black Friday, and it's a major shopping day. Many companies — brick and mortar, or click and order — offer special promotions and discounts to entice shoppers to buy.

It's a day of buying frenzy!

It's quite ironic that Black Friday immediately follows an American day of celebration with family and close friends, in which we reflect upon all the things we have to be thankful for.

So we at Karelia Software would like to offer a bit of a twist on a Black Friday promotion. On Friday, we are going to offer a substantial discount off of Sandvox (regular or edition, individual or household license) but we ask you to think back to Thanksgiving day's thankfulness and full stomach, and make a donation to a charitable organization to help somebody in need — somebody who doesn't have the luxury of using a computer, building websites, reading and writing blogs, chatting with friends all over the world, having a big feast with friends and family, shopping all day at the mall (or in front of the computer screen), and so forth.

We're asking you to take some of the money you are saving by buying Sandvox at a discount — or any other money you are "saving" on Black Friday by getting such good deals on all that stuff — and send a charitable donation to an organization that you feel has a worthy cause. Spread some of the warmth you have to somebody who doesn't have as much to be thankful for.

Where could you make a contribution? There's a community center or food bank in your town that could use some help. (A Google search for "charity" will likely find some nearby organizations.) Perhaps you'd like to help with an area recently struck by disaster, such as helping the flood victims of Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines. Or you could pick a nearby classroom in a low-income area that needs funds for its programs. If you've read Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea you might want to donate to his peace-creating school-building program in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Or, look up another organization that resonates with you.

How much you give is up to you.

Let's make Black Friday stand for something more than just a shopping frenzy.

Oh yes, the coupon code for a 50% discount off of Sandvox, valid on Friday November 27 2009, is "make a donation". You'll save between $28 and $68 from this deal, and we hope you'll use that to give somebody else something to be thankful for.

Photo by goodrob13

MacGraPhoto Bundle & Discount

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:51:24 -0800

Karelia Software is participating, peripherally, in the MacGraPhoto software bundle, available until the end of November.

The main bundle, organized by our friends at Apparent Software, features seven handy graphics-related applications, bundled together for US $39.99. If you are building a website that has a lot of graphics on it, you may find several of these utilities coming in extremely handy.

Buyers of the bundle can also get fifty-percent discounts off of several general applications (including Sandvox).

If you find yourself needing to manipulate graphics, check out the MacGraPhoto bundle quickly!

"One Finger Discount" — A great week for great deals on Mac Software

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:47:13 -0800

☚ We wanted to point out that Sandvox, along with a host of other Mac applications, are on sale this week for 20% off, via the website One Finger Discount. At least one of our third-party designers is also participating, so search for 'Sandvox' on the page to see what offers are available.

There is more to Mac software than just the applications from Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe! There are apps here for remote collaborating, image editing, crossword puzzling, recipe filing, writing, disk organizing, money managing, game playing, language learning, website building, ringtone creating, hard drive checking, note taking, news reading, text processing, file transferring, collection organizing, health managing, time tracking, podcasting, blogging, video converting, password collecting, color coordinating, web researching, remote controlling, sound recording, morning awakening, dock de-cluttering, web server monitoring, preference shuffling, intruder detecting, domain name managing, FTPing, word processing, Wii transferring, invoicing, to-do list check-off-ing, geotagging, distraction reducing, story narrating, mind mapping, ipod recovering, window moving, puzzle solving, cross-stitch designing, pet record-keeping, audio processing, music notation quizzing, healthy eating, screenshotting, text expanding, spam preventing, weather predicting, and data organizing. And more that I'm not mentioning!

Come check out what these great companies have to offer! Most of these are "try before you buy" so you will know what you are getting before you commit your cash.

iMedia Browser 1.2.1 — and a preview of things to come

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:44:43 -0800

We just released version 1.2.1 of our freeware iMedia Browser. This update fixes a number of issues that were a result of changes in Snow Leopard — most notably, it solves a problem with display of the "back of the window" where licensing information and display settings are found. It also adds two new localizations: Brazilian Portuguese, contributed by Paulo Neto, and Russian, contributed by Alexandr Slavyshensky.

We thought we'd use this post as a chance to give everybody a sneak peek at the next major update to iMedia Browser. (Since the core functionality of the browser is the open-source iMedia Browser framework, it's not like development can proceed in secret!)

Peter Baumgartner, lead developer of FotoMagico, has been doing the heavy lifting of rewriting the framework from the ground up. This new version is much more responsive than the current release, because it loads its data "lazily" as needed. The new architecture also allows for asynchronous loading, which means that data sources that take a moment to load (such as over a network) can now be used. Case in point: new to iMedia 2 will be a Flickr module, in which Flickr-based photos can be quickly previewed and dragged out in full size, as well as an Image Capture module, allowing you to plug in a digital camera and drag out images from its memory card. Other enhancements to the project include a new "combo view" of lists (a vertically scrolling list with a thumbnail and additional information) and much faster thumbnail display.

iMedia 2 is still a few months away from release, with developers from a number of companies contributing, but it is progressing quite nicely! Of course we welcome other developers to get involved in its development (and incorporating the framework directly into their applications), so developers please stop by the Google Code page for iMedia.

Happy Halloween 2009 from Sandvox!

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:52:05 -0700

(view linked page for a fun full-sized image....)

Be sure to pre-scale your QuickTime movies

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:02:30 -0700

We got an inquiry from Mike E. recently about some problems he was noticing with a Sandvox-built site playing back QuickTime movies when viewed from a Windows machine. While the movie played fine on a Mac, it seemed that as soon as he updated to the latest version of QuickTime on his PC, the movie he had in a pagelet stopped displaying. In other words, a broken image, blank, not visible or displaying properly.

It turns out that there is a bug in the newest version of the QuickTime plugin for Windows, in that it can't handle scaled-down movies. In other words, a movie where the original pixel size of the movie (for instance, 480 pixels wide) gets scaled down to fit the sidebar (in this case, 200 pixels wide).

As we mention in our documentation, it's a good idea for you to scale down your movie to match the viewing size on your website, but the reasons we mention there have to do with file size and transmission time, as well as video quality. When you put a larger movie on your website, Sandvox is not able to scale down the original movie data to the viewing size, though your web browser is perfectly happy (except for this new Windows bug) to load the full size movie and shrink it down to fit the available space. The problem is that movies tend to hold a lot of data, and that means extra time to download that movie so it can play. You don't want your visitors to have to wait any longer than necessary to be able to watch the video, do you?

So if you have an embedded QuickTime video on your website, we recommend using a video tool to scale down the size of your video to fit the container it's in. The dimensions you need to keep in mind are: 200 pixels wide for a pagelet, 320 pixels wide for a page with a sidebar, and 640 pixels for a page without a sidebar.

Sandvox 1.6.5 Released; How to Get it for Free

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:03:53 -0700

Today we released an update to Sandvox. The latest version, 1.6.5, contains a few fixes to publishing and the iMedia Browser. You can fetch it via the usual methods: a download from our website, or by checking for updates from the Sandvox menu of the application itself.

Along with this new version, we are also announcing a special promotion that starts now and lasts through the entire month of November — one that can get you a license to Sandvox Pro for Free!

We've teamed up with a couple of our recommended website hosts for the entire month of November and will be giving away a free single-user license to Sandvox Pro with proof of a new one-year hosting signup from either A2 Hosting or Server Logistics, if purchased through the links on our hosting comparison chart.

Here's how this special, one-month promo works: You decide which plan you want, from either Server Logistics or A2 Hosting, and sign up for a year (or more) of hosting using the online form our comparison chart links to. Then, just forward the hosting company's "welcome" email to freesandvox@karelia.com. As soon as we receive your email and verify the purchase, we'll send you a gift certificate code for a free single-user license to Sandvox Pro.

(If you already have Sandvox Regular Edition, and you are looking for a new hosting company, you can take advantage of this offer to upgrade your license to the Pro edition, as well!)

That's pretty cool, but it gets better. The participating hosts are also offering special discounts on hosting for Sandvoxers. Server Logistics is offering a 15% discount and A2 Hosting is offering a 25% discount on a hosting package — just enter the coupon code FREESANDVOX when you check out from the hosting company's website.

With the discount coupon code applied, you can easily get a full year of hosting, plus Sandvox, for less than the normal price for Sandvox itself!

Go here to compare the available plans, review the details, and take advantage of this month-long offer.

Karelia Announces Version 1.6.4 of Sandvox Website Builder Application

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:57:23 -0700

ALAMEDA, CA — Karelia Software has released version 1.6.4 of Sandvox®, its award-winning website design software for Mac OS X. Version 1.6.4 is a free update and provides full compatibility with Snow Leopard, Apple's Mac OS X version 10.6.

In addition to full Snow Leopard compatibility, Sandvox 1.6.4 responds to a recent change in Amazon.com’s API, by providing a critical update to its Amazon List Pages and Pagelet code and restoring full functionality.

Karelia is also proud to announce that Sandvox has been localized to Brazilian Portuguese.

Sandvox 1.6.4 is a recommended download for all users.

A Universal Binary for PowerPC and Intel architectures, Sandvox 1.6 requires Mac OS X "Tiger" version 10.4.11, or "Leopard" version 10.5, or "Snow Leopard" version 10.6 and above, and is available in English, French, Danish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. A single-user license to Sandvox costs $57 (USD); a single-user license for the Pro edition (enabling raw HTML editing plus additional Google integration) costs $97 (USD). Household licenses and site licenses are also available.

More information about Sandvox is available at Karelia's website (created with Sandvox, of course). Review copies for traditional and online media are available. Please direct requests to the address below and include your name along with your publication's or podcast's name and/or URL and any information about particular features or needs of special interest to your readership or audience.

Yes, Virginia, Sandvox is Compatible with Snow Leopard

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:30:41 -0700

We've gotten some queries about Snow Leopard compatibility, so we should state outright that yes, Sandvox works well with Snow Leopard.

(Photo CC by "Tambuko the Jaguar" from Flickr)

New Karelia Website Design Inspired By Locomotive Blueprints

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:00:21 -0700

Today we launched a new design for the Karelia website. Continuing the old-timey, hand-crafted feeling we like to convey, and following on the locomotive metaphor in our logo, we found a beautiful old blueprint from Baldwin Locomotive Works dating back to 1907. We adapted the blueprint for our banner; Charlie at Blueball Design helped us turn this into working CSS.

The original blueprint is beautiful. Links to larger versions of the image can be found on the linked page above, next to the text "Blueprint showing Boiler Seams."

Quick note: We will be having a big sale on licenses to Sandvox starting tomorrow morning, for members of our email alert list. If you are not on the list, sign up now!