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Karelia Announces Sandvox Black Friday Sale, with a twist

apple storeThe 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

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

macgraphotoThe 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

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

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!

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