Released before Apple iWeb but after Rapid Weaver, Sandvox follows a long line of WYSIWYG Web site creation and maintenance applications that began with the long forgotten Adobe Pagemill in 1994. Sandvox underwent a major code rewrite with version 1.5. At the time of this review, version 1.6.2 is in beta testing.
Template-Based Design
At its core, Sandvox is a remarkably versatile solution. Add pages to build a site. At any point during the process, click on a new design and the entire look of the site is transformed. The interface is clean and well organized. Developers with coding and CSS background can produce custom templates. Dozens that ship with the application and many from third parties fall roughly into two categories:
- Flashy designs that add a great deal of visual excitement to plain text.
- Minimialist designs that do not compete with user-added graphics.
Unfortunately for creative folks, most fall into category number one. Phrased as tactfully as possible, 90 percent of the alphabetically stored design templates would be much better if Karelia had an art director responsible for quality control who offered aesthetic advice on font selection, margins, color palettes and text decoration. (If such a person already exists, [s]he is either wearing too many hats or is more concerned with bulk than beauty.) Nevertheless, new templates can be added either by Karelia or third parties so current design limitations may not be as important as the overall user experience.
Though most page elements seamlessly conform to different designs, occasionally some third-party templates have specific width and height requirements for a few global graphics. When not cropped properly, art may be stretched or omitted. When this happens, the user may need to modify perhaps three art elements.
It is nice that Sandvox allows multiple sites to be opened in the same session -- either versions of the same one or totally different ones. This way, code can be copied from one to the other. Sandvox does not, however, open or import sites generated with other applications.
Select a Page Style
Select any of eleven page styles ranging from Rich Text to Photo or Contact Form. Nineteen different types of Pagelets can be inserted into the Sidebar (right side of page for most designs) or become a Callout (flushed to the left for most designs), around which text is wrapped. Preformated page styles minimize the amount of hand-coding required, as modifications to them can be performed from a floating Inspector palette. Include QuickTime or YouTube movies and Flickr badges or Delicious Lists.
Even with all the page styles, there will be times when HTML hand coding or Code Injection is required. There's no automatic method of creating bulleted or numbered lists and tables without it. And particularly when pasting rich text, code gets sloppy. (Unnecessary nested style tags that change font attributes to something foreign before changing back to what is visible within the browser; nested old and new hypertext links; somewhat random code selection for line breaks using <div>, <br /> or <p> tags. There's also a fair amount of non-breaking space tags added that are ignored in the Sandvox preview but honored in Web browsers.) Gaining access to HTML code (but not CSS) is possible with Sandvox Pro Edition. Therein it is possible to find and replace phrases or paste in plain text or code. (Editor update 02/26/2010: Shift-Option-Command-v to paste text and retain target formatting.)
Preference for More
The contextual Inspector offers ever increasing access to customization. Yet it falls short of enabling fully customizable designs. Changing template fonts or any default color palettes are a dream at this point. Some third-party template designers sell multiple versions of the same design in different colors as a remedy. (Editor update 02/20/2010: Slight modifications are possible by overriding global CSS with Code Injection feature in Sandvox Pro.)
Anemic preferences under the application menu offer a few global options for image quality, application update settings, and five other general preferences. Users have the option of downloading beta copies or just full-release versions. Missing are Autosave options -- at least missing from the Preferences window. A dozen or so useful options can be set using Terminal.
By default Autosave is activated every 60 seconds. For a small site, the interruption may go unnoticed. For one that is tens of megabytes (like this one), Autosave halts performance in the middle of typing for as long as 15 to 25 seconds. Apparently, the entire document is being saved in a temporary location while the old backup is moved to the Trash. Obviously, waiting 25 seconds every 60 creates a frustrating usability issue. After changing a variable with Terminal, the Autosave interval can be extended to 5 minutes. It would be very useful to have Autosave options within the Preferences window. There, one should not only be able to set the frequency but also the delay between keystrokes or mouse clicks. This would prevent the application from pausing in the middle of typing a sentence or attempting to highlight text.
In addition to caching a copy of the site during Autosave, a backup Snapshot can automatically be created when the site is opened and also evoked with Command-S. Should the design get out of hand, the user can select Revert to Snapshot.
Publishing Web Sites
Sandvox is compatible with MobileMe, WebDav and FTP. (Editor update 11/08/2009: SFTP problem was traced to ISP's new port assignment.) From within the application, the user stores a user name and password. Press the Publish icon to upload incremental changes or the complete site. There has been a Publish (site upload) bug that extends publishing time unless a Sandvox 1.6.1 collection is closed and reopened just before publishing when using Tiger on large collections (still apparent in 1.6.2b2 but work is ongoing).
Conclusions
The fundamental premise of CSS (cascading style sheets) is that the appearance of key data containers can be controlled by style sheets. For webmasters familiar with Dreamweaver or hand coding, Sandvox may appear limiting and unnecessary. On the other hand, those who want to get a Web site published without the steep learning curve or who want to devote more time to other tasks may treasure numerous Sandvox formatting options.
Closely linked with the same Webkit as Safari, Sandvox is only for Mac users. There's just one or two compatibility issues requiring workarounds for Safari 3 beta that may be resolved by the final release. Sandvox pages viewed in Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows or Macintosh platforms reveal no significant anomalies. Pages scale well to the iPhone with reflowed text in some areas to keep it legible.
Sandvox offers an impressive array of blogging options, easily editable meta tags and Google Analytics integration. Access to support is available through email within the application or on the Web site. This demonstrates Karelia concern extends to helping customers gain visibility and more usefulness from its products.
Tremendous progress has been made since the first Sandvox release. Yet, everything has been kept under the 1.x moniker so all updates have been free. Versions 1.2.8 and 1.6.0 had their fair share of crashes.
No crashes have been observed in 1.6.1, while the 1.6.2 squashes a few obscure bugs. After this year's WWDC, programmers will likely return with many more ideas for version 1.7 as they chart the course to an even greater 2.0. Hopefully, along the way, Karelia will see the need to hire an art director to fine tune existing templates and raise the standard for future ones.
About the Reviewer
Vast pre-press experience has been punctuated by forays into Web publishing over the past 30+ years. In the infancy of the Internet, Pagemill and Sitemill where used when released. A personal website generator and multi-site management application called Adjuvant was authored in 2001, though never publicly released. From 1996 to 2005, a Helix developer Web site was hand-coded in basic HTML along with several smaller sites. GoLive was used for another site and Sandvox has been used to maintain the Reactive Imaging site since version 1.2.8 in 2007.