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by Chris Barylick
January 27th, 2006
Sit back for a second and remember back to the early and mid-90's Despite slower computers, less stable system architectures and countless Performa computers, HTML was beginning to emerge and find a presence. The next big thing around the conference table, this and the Web had to be tamed and used, both on the corporate and personal level.
The objective established, next came the effort to make HTML accessible to the masses via WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs that allowed users to graphically build Web pages while the application wrote the HTML code in the background.
This was met with differing degrees of success. Programs like Adobe's Pagemill allowed for relatively clean code to be written while more professional suites like Macromedia's Dreamweaver worked to write cleaner code via a graphical interface. Other approaches to the problem included software like Bare Bones Software's BBEdit that allowed Web designers to remain in a text editor while providing clickable options which inserted routine bits of HTML code.
In the following years, the standard has shifted. Web technologies have pushed the standard to include photo galleries, blogs, multimedia and audio. And while these may be the coolest bells and whistles to have, these can be a true pain to code into a Web site. Thus, a market exists to make this easy to do on the Mac.
When Apple announced iWeb as part of its iLife 2006 suite a few weeks ago at Macworld Expo, it knew where the winds were blowing in terms of its digital lifestyle package and Web publishing. Unfortunately, toes were stepped on, as was the case with Konfabulator and Dashboard when Tiger was released. Sandvox, a WYSIWYG Web layout tool from Karelia Software, stands as the current underdog that may just beat Apple in its goal to make this type of Web publishing accessible to a wider audience.
Karelia Software's Sandvox helps lay out a new shared photo library.
Currently in a timed beta due to expire on February 17th, 2006, Sandvox allows users to choose from multiple templates and go from there. Like iWeb, users can easily drag in additional content such as movies, picture libraries, external files, podcasts and anything else they may wish to include within the site via a graphical interface as well as a raw code window. Click on an element such as a link, text or image and an inspector can be pulled up to specify properties such as where a link may head towards, an image's size and other information.
Where Web design and site features have always been a pain in the neck for anyone who didn't do this on a regular basis, uploading has always been another thing to trip over. Sandvox handles this well by providing not only full support for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and .Mac protocols, but also provides a convenient assistant program that lets users specify if their machine will act as the server or whether the files need to be sent to another server, which can be chosen from a built-in list or manually specified. Once these settings have been saved, users can pull down convenient choices such as "Publish Changes" and "Publish Entire Site" to send the files to the server.
A step-through menu helps simplify the upload process.
Changes can be tracked from both ends via full RSS support, which can save the user the pain of having to look up the necessary XML code to insert into the site and allow it to be subscribed to by RSS readers around the Internet. Keywords, which are the bread and butter for many sites, can be easily inserted into a visible tab to change the Meta tag data and help target it for search engines.
Karelia is currently offering Sandvox as a public beta, which shows strong confidence in the software, but also includes the proviso that it's still in development and not responsible for any failures it may cause. Having garnered four stars, thousands of downloads and some very positive comments on VersionTracker.com, Sandvox is in the category of eagerly awaited software and something that meets the needs of the day. The program is a 14.1 megabyte download that expands to occupy 34.2 megabytes of space when installed. Sandvox requires Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later to download and run.
I don't envy Karelia's position at this point, especially when Apple comes out with something similar to what they were working on prior to their release of Sandvox 1.0. Maybe someone mentioned it to the wrong person at a cocktail party and the two charged home, a clear vision of a killer app in their minds.
And while getting to the bottom of this might be fun, it's a chicken and the egg debate. Apple has something that people seem to like with iWeb and Karelia looks to be in an excellent position to give Apple a run for its money with iWeb, especially if they pay as close attention to the updates and bug fixes as they seem to be giving it now. Users will have to submit an e-mail address to receive access to Karelia's download page for the public beta, but that seems to be the only hurdle.
Take a look, see what you think and if it can offer something you might have needed. It's worth the time.
That wraps things up for this week. As always, if you see anything cool, useful or interesting in the Mac world, let me know.
Chris Barylick covers games for The Mac Observer, and has written for Inside Mac Games, MacGamer, UPI, the Washington Post, and other publications.
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Observer Comments
I tried the beta and found it confusing and not nearly as easy to use as RapidWeaver. I also think RW's template selection is more robust. Maybe when it's out of beta It'll give RW a run for it's money, but for now I'll keep using RW.
I just got iLife 06 in the mail the other day and haven't had a chance to use iWeb yet so can't comment on that.
I've been WYSIWYGing for years with Netscape Composer. It supports drag and drop in photos, tables, and all the usual text editing. Its not a magazine editor for fancy websites, more like "Word" for HTML. And it publishes easily. I have most all my personal files on my website. While browsing with Netscape, I can hit ^E and be editing the page, and hit ^S and it publishes back to the website. It doesn't get any easier than that. Not super fancy, but shouldn't be overlooked if you want to edit web pages.
I have to second the vote of comfidence for Composer. It's free....included with the latest versions of either Netscape or Mozilla, and it's pretty good.
Also, for a more robust version of Composer with a site manager and some more bells and whistles...check out the open source Nvu. It's still free!
http://nvu.com/
I find NVU comes in handy. I've used it in combination with RapidWeaver when I want to knock up some html to cut and paste.
QuoteGuest wrote:
I have to second the vote of comfidence for Composer. It's free....included with the latest versions of either Netscape or Mozilla, and it's pretty good.
Also, for a more robust version of Composer with a site manager and some more bells and whistles...check out the open source Nvu. It's still free!
http://nvu.com/
QuoteMBS wrote:
I just got iLife 06 in the mail the other day and haven't had a chance to use iWeb yet so can't comment on that.
I bought iLife '06 the day after it was announced and tried out several of the apps within it. Like you, I've been using Rapidweaver for a while and am happy with it. My initial impression of iWeb was "W*O*W*!". It lets you create incredible graphic effects in seconds - effects RW can't come close to equaling. When I dug a bit deeper in the program I saw it was all surface. Gorgeous, but that's all. And it takes forever to load an iWeb site.
Sandvox looks like it has potential, but the beta I've just used is barely a 'proof of concept' effort.
For the cost of these three, you could buy each without breaking the bank.
Rapidweaver is proven, flexible, capable, but not exactly a star graphics performer. Like, but better than, Composer.
iLife is worth the money ... just not for iWeb as a stand-alone web-creation app. GarageBand will build your Pod Casts for you.
Sandvox ... we'll know more about it when it goes gold. It looks like it could fall happily between the other two.
The irony is that the very first browser was a WYSIWYG browser/editor - written on Next. HTML was meant to be something the computer used, not something users had to know.
Unfortunately it proved too difficult to implement the same functionality on other O/S at the time, compared to implementing a browser.
Now we come full circle!
since this review implicitly suggests a comparison between iWeb and Sandvox, it might be worthwhile to actually engage the comparison. There are many reasons why Sandvox is an underdog worth rooting for, but none of them are mentioned here. For example, Apple's iWeb offering is limited to .Mac support, and constrains HTML use. I don't personally care who got what idea from whom [and the Sandvox creators have publicly stated that they have no evidence Apple "borrowed" any ideas from their team], but I think you need to give your readers a comparative reason to download a 15mb file.
Mon Jan 30, 2006 12:28 am Subject:
From: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/features/publishing.html
"iWeb publishing requires Internet and webserver access (.Mac recommended)."
From: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iweb/1.0/en/bld1046.html
"If you don't publish your site to .Mac, these features are unavailable: Password protection, Hit counter, Slideshow with viewing controls"
Also, you are prompted to enter the full URL so your RSS feed is created properly.
I've tried both iWeb and Sandvox. I find Sandvox beta to be more useful with important (to me) features that iWeb lacks. It is still buggy, but I am having a really good time with it. Tried RapidWeaver before, and really wasn't that impressed but haven't checked out the latest version. Still seemed limited in the features that were important to me. I guess a lot depends on how you like to work though. Sandvox fits my thought process and workflow pretty well.
The things I like about Sandvox. Some support for Raw HTML both as a page and as "pagelets" which are quite useful. Keyword support. Ability to add additional header data. Ability to create multiple layer photo albums (within reason) i.e have a Travel album with sub albums for different places. -- It is early beta and has some ways to go to improve stability and speed, but I find it to be hold a lot of promise. Going to continue to work with the beta and "root for the underdog". A diamond in the rough.
My thought is not where it is now, but were it will be in a few months. I'll be watching its development closely.
Fri Mar 17, 2006 1:18 pm Subject: Feedback agent listed APPLE???
When I first installed the beta, I was asked if I wanted to install the crash feedback agent which would send feedback to Karelia Software and APPLE...
Yes. APPLE. Is there something we should know? Maybe they are about to enter into a partnership?
Regardless, I was unable to connect to my ISP using the same info I use in Dreamweaver or any other FTP agent for that matter. It behaves strikingly similar to Contribute which I can never get a connection with either. SandVox must require access to the site root directory, which won't work in my environment where we use pointers and aliases and only grant access at the directory level. Oh well, it seems cool other than not being able to connect to my ISP. I'll visit Karelia Software's website to see what requirements there may be.
I've been working on getting my content-rich site up and running for a month. Why a month? Because nVu doesn't understand 'folders'. (directories) As soon as I make a folder, it won't let me edit pages within that folder. How helpful is that? It also doesn't like javascript. Whenever I put java into one of my pages (i.e., Adsense or an Amazon product) nVu mangles the code. If I use nVu for over an hour, the page-header text creeps up and up, until you can only see the bottoms of the letters. What's with that? I've tried KompoZer too. Same thing.
I'm sick of nVu headaches!
Check out some known bug reports:
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~charlescooke/nvubugs10.htm
http://forum.nvudev.org/viewtopic.php?t=6090&sid=46c03d35cd9459dfb76c444fa658283e
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