Along with the rest of the Mac world, we saw the Macworld keynote, and naturally we were not too pleased to see how similar Apple's iWeb and its intended audience turns out to be to our vision of Sandvox. Lightning has indeed struck twice.
Clearly, Mac users who just want to get their family photos and simple blog published on their .mac account are going to be using iWeb. There is no way that we can compete with what is essentially bundled software.
What Sandvox can offer is a compelling alternative to iWeb, just as Watson turned into an alternative to Sherlock 3; Path Finder is an alternative to Finder; NetNewsWire and a host of others are alternatives to Safari's RSS reader; and Adium can replace iChat. As each of these offer solutions to the limitations provided by Apple's software, so too will Sandvox.
Of course, with only a few hours having elapsed since the announcement, we are still honing these differences, but out of the gate, some of the biggest limitations of iWeb (.mac only, not pluggable, no ability for HTML content) can become strengths for Sandvox.
As we move forward past version 1.0, we will be able to further distinguish Sandvox from iWeb by focusing on features that our users demand that will never be a part of the iLife suite.
