Sandvox: First Impressions
Background
I have been keeping an eye on Karelia Software’s website for news about Sandvox for quite sometime now. My interest was perked when I heard it was in development for two reasons:
Karelia Software was behind Watson, one of the most interesting and inspired early Os X 3rd party applications. Watson was one of the first applications to explore using custom offline interfaces for web services, an idea that is very hot right now (see Dashboard, RSS Feed Readers, Google Earth, and Cocoalicious, for a few off the top of my head). Watson was a forward thinking application that unfortunately died when Apple turned Sherlock into an (oddly unusable) Watson clone and bundled it with Jaguar.
Dan Wood, who is one-half of Karelia, said his inspiration to create Sandvox came from his seeing the power of CSS and in particular, the beauty and flexibility of the designs found at The CSS Zen Garden. These are exactly same influences that rejuvenated my own interest in web development when I first encountered them a little over a year ago.
It isn’t often that a developer who is capable of a visionary application lets is be known that they have a new application in the works that lands squarely in your interest zone and is inspired by the same things that inspire you. So when the first public beta of Sandvox was released today, I was quick to try it out.
About Sandvox
What Sandvox is:
Sandvox is an offline website creation application. Websites are created locally and stored as a special file type with the extension “.svxSite.” Sandvox offers different ways to upload your website to a server, the most basic of which is to export the website as HTML and upload it manually.
Websites in Sandvox use templates. You can switch which template your website uses at any time without affecting the content on your pages. But you cannot directly modify the “look” of a template in any way, not even font changes. The documentation hints that this will be changing in the future. Templates are stored inside the Sandvox application package. The templates themselves at a minimum seem to consist of a “main.css” file and the required image files. In the future, designers will be welcome to create their own Sandvox designs. They are planning on releasing a “designer’s kit (coming soon) that discusses how pages and pagelets are presented” (Sandvox Faq).
Sandvox allows the creation of pages and “pagelets” (bits of content that can be used on many different pages at once, such as list of links). The types of pages you can create in Sandvox and the structure of it’s editing functionality are geared toward creating “blog-style” content (i.e. blogs and photo galleries).
Sandvox automatically generates RSS feeds for your site.
Sandvox is OS X only
What Sandvox is not:
Sandvox is not an application for creating original website designs or editing templates to create website designs. In fact, Sandvox does not contain any functionality at all that allows you to change the “look” of your website except for the ability to switch between different templates. This means that Sandvox contains no CSS editing functionality, which I found a bit surprising.
Sandvox is not a particularly innovative application. Both iBlog and Rapidweaver contain a lot of overlap functionality.
Sandvox does not create purely semantic XHTML. In other words, Sandvox creates some XHTML tags that do not have any semantic meaning and are only used as hooks for CSS. For example:
How big a deal this is differs from person to person. In comparison to an application like Dreamweaver, the improvements to the generated XHTML are immeasurable.
With all that being said, Sandvox is a flawlessly executed piece of Mac OS X software. It follows all the right conventions and it has that extra bit of design pizz-azz that people on the platform appreciate (despite it’s beta-ness.) If want an application that performs the above functions, it would be hard for another application to do better1.
Impressions
My first impression is that Sandvox works, both as a product and as an approach to website creation. Its ease of use and feature set can benefit a lot of people. This is despite heavy competition from other methods of getting your words and photos online, mainly from server-side blogging software.
The advantage that Sandvox holds over a server-side blogging package is that it does not rely on a web interface. Web interfaces are great; they aren’t tied to any one platform or computer. But they become cumbersome quickly when things become more complicated than a text box with a publish button. In particular, web interfaces quickly start to breakdown once photos start getting involved. Anyone who has ever uploaded photo gallery one image at a time can attest to this. Even basic blog tasks like adding a list of links and badges to your sidebar are just barely adequately served by web interfaces.
On the other hand, even if you are using a server-side blogging package instead of Sandvox, your posts and photo galleries don’t need to be managed through web interfaces. If you know CSS, XHTML, MySQL, and a server-side scripting language, a server-side blogging package’s look and behavior can be customized while maintaining the ease of updating that comes from the underlying blog core. External editors and photo management applications with XML-RPC support can be used to manage content and upload content outside of a web interface.
But the problem is that the amount of technical know-how between these two options is huge and there isn’t anything in between. Everyone who doesn’t know the four web technologies you need to customize a blog are stuck with an out-of-the-box blogging package’s limited options. Divides like that are called niches, and niches are what small software development companies are around to fill.
So there is a place for products like Sandvox. I don’t know what Sandvox brings to the table that Rapidweaver and iBlog don’t (in the case of iBlog, I suspect a lot), hopefully a good comparison review will appear shortly. My interest in Sandvox has as much to do with the developers track record as it does with what the application does.
Enter iWeb
While I am on the subject of the developer’s track record… as I pointed out before, Karelia is on the slim list of developers who have had a product (arguably) copied and added to the OS for free by Apple. But Karelia, maybe about to blaze a trail of their own in this area. “iWeb,” that is the name of an application that was accidently leaked by Apple on their website that will likely be announced tomorrow at Macworld.
I hate to say it, but after experiencing the combination of ease of use and media-suave in Sandvox, this just feels like an iApp. With that and the current state of web publishing today (exploding). We may find out tomorrow that Karelia got the short-end of the stick once again (But they’re not bitter: “the truth is that Karelia’s product ideas just happen to be mainstream, like Apple’s” (The Story Behind Karelia’s New Logo).
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Very important to note that I haven’t tried iBlog or Rapidweaver. ↑
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