New Sandvox 2.5 version available for Snow Leopard and above
While we continue to support Sandvox 2.2.x for Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), we encourage you to upgrade your Mac to the latest OS to take advantage of new features that require more recent operating systems. If you are already running 10.6 or higher, you can download the new 2.5 Sandvox directly. Otherwise, keep using Sandvox 2.2.x!
New Features
- Footers support custom alignment
Objects
- Fixes glitchy layout while dragging inline objects
- Turning on Gallery for Photo Grids properly updates the Web Editor
- Corrects position of RSS badge icon in some configurations
- Improves layout of Contact Form labels
- Placeholders:
- Corrects appearance of YouTube when no video has been chosen
- For certain websites that do not support being embedded in other websites, Sandvox displays a placeholder
- Corrects appearance of Raw HTML placeholders
- Fixes a crash choosing a file to insert
Publishing
- Resolves a crash during publishing
Other Bug Fixes
- Addresses issues with editing, including dragging or pasting content in
Sandvox 2.0 rocks an entirely new architecture for web publishing with a comfortably familiar, yet greatly enhanced user experience. Sporting over five dozen major new features and enhancements, we redefine this category of application. Here are just some of the highlights:
New Features
- There is no longer a distinction between “Regular” and “Pro” editions of Sandvox. Everybody gets Pro features.
- No more page “types.” Lay out text, images, video, and other objects on the page as you see fit. Plus, we still have a bunch of templates to get you started building a page.
- Completely revamped Inspector, giving more precise control of your website, and a cleaner layout:
- There are now six segments
- More options from the Document inspector and page inspector for what items on a page get displayed.
- Option to specify exactly which sidebar objects appear on a given page.
- A regular page can be converted into a collection, and vice-versa.
- Wrap inspector let you adjust objects’ alignment and positioning on the page
- Set exact image size or set original size with the metrics inspector
- Link inspector to specify where a page links: another URL, a page on the site, or full-size images.
- The rightmost segment is for options specific to the object currently selected.
- Massively improved editor UI:
- Selecting an object works much closer to traditional desktop publishing apps. Click once to select an object; click again to focus on it to start editing it, e.g. Text Boxes
- Images and other objects can be resized
- Objects can be dragged around to adjust their position, with full controls available in the Wrap Inspector
- Drag and drop support is heavily improved. e.g. drag a file onto a media placeholder or index and Sandvox will cleanly handle it for you
- Indexes are far more configurable; they can be moved around the page, like any other object. And we’ve expanded the layout choices available
- Objects on a page can be repositioned by dragging them to the left/center/right of the text column (with a guideline to indicate placement), or using the inspector.
- Designs:
- 6 new designs: Appleseed, Aurora Palace, Telegraph Office, Square Perch, Slate Manifest, Outside the Lines
- We’ve introduced a number of color variations to our classic designs
- The Sandvox 1.x bonus designs pack is now included within the app
- Brand new Design Chooser:
- Conveniently groups design variations together
- Filter to show only designs of a particular category
- Type-ahead if you are looking to select a particular design by name
- Button to open up plugin discovery window to make it easier to find additional designs
- Flip quickly through designs from the menus without opening up the design chooser
- If the design supports it, site menu can be laid out hierarchically as a drop-down/pop-up menu
- Photo Grid sports a Gallery option for a beautiful JS display of your pictures big and bold and bright.
- Integration with Twitter and Facebook:
- Show feeds from Twitter
- New Twitter “Tweet” button object
- New Facebook “Like” button object
- Use Facebook as a commenting system
- Media Browser Improvements:
- Re-built, faster and more powerful architecture
- New module to browse Flickr photos
- New “Combo” view for looking at preview and description side-by-side
- Updates to Page Details Area:
- Moved from the lower corner to the main area underneath the web view so it is easier to fit
- See the URL of a page, and be able to edit the page title inline
- See and edit the Window Title and Meta Description of a page, with new countdown indicator
- For external links chosen in site outline, edit the URL of the page
- For raw HTML or text pages, button to open up editor
- For other downloadable files (such as PDFs), button to choose the file
- Keywords have moved into the Page Inspector, as they are not actually very important to search engines.
- Each page includes its thumbnail (if there is one), so that websites linking to the page (Facebook, Digg, Yahoo, MySpace, etc.) display that thumbnail
- HTML5 page generation. The goal is to make sure that your multimedia website is compatible with as many devices as possible, including iPhone/iPad, and both Mac and Windows.
- There is a new code injection option for adding site-wide CSS; extremely handy for customizing a design. (Before, you had to insert your custom CSS into the head area of every page.)
- Overhauled Raw HTML editor:
- Quick validation of your code as you type
- Validate HTML using w3.org’s service on a per-object basis from the editor window toolbar
- Specify the type of code; e.g. PHP will not attempt to be previewed in Sandvox, but will instead appear as a little “PHP” placeholder
- Brand new Cocoa plug-in API; look for great plug-ins coming from us and third-party developers.
- Enhancements to running as a demo:
- Sandvox is free to try for sites of up to five pages, rather than one in the previous version
- Anything outside that limit will be published as a placeholder until a Sandvox license is purchased
- When run as a demo, no more yellow box warning it’s a demo
Improvements
- Commenting system and Google integration now live in their own sheets, for easier setup.
- Tidied up preferences window.
- Image preferences are no longer global preferences, but are now per-document.
- For exporting to CD-ROMs or for certain web hosts, collection URLs can be generated to end with “/index.html” rather than just “/”
- Using the Inspector, you have a lot more control about what pieces of a page (titles, sidebar, logo, etc.) will be shown. For example, it’s more valuable to your site if a page’s title is hidden, rather than having no title at all.
- YouTube videos use the most up-to-date embedded Flash/HTML5 player; border, border colors, and HD options are no longer supported.
- Smarter logic for automatically adding pages to the site menu.
- Sandvox does a much better job of keeping HTML tidy while you type.
- The publishing system is more efficient, so all files in the site are only re-published if needed (previously, this capability only applied to pages and media files).
- Improved page loading performance when using many of our built-in plug-ins.
- Many other subtle UI improvements for a healthier, more energizing website building experience.
- Sandvox is now a signed application, which means in future updates, the Keychain should stop asking you if you want to re-give Sandvox access to it
- To aid custom HTML, jQuery is available on every page.
- Sandvox auto-saves your document, while still giving you access to the traditional “Save” menu
- New architecture results in much greater stability
- New architecture yields much better ability to undo and redo changes
- Updated documentation and additional pages
- For blogs, a new Titles & Summaries index type with a lot of options, replacing a number of non-interchangeable index types in the old Sandvox
- RSS feeds’ entries can be truncated, separately from how it is configured in its corresponding blog
- CSS is aggregated into a single file for faster website loading
- HTML markup that Sandvox generates from its rich text is much “cleaner” than earlier versions
- Any media placeholder, or an image/video/audio/flash object, can be changed into any other media type
- Any page can be turned into a collection automatically by dragging items onto it in the site outline. (Unless it has already been published as a page.)
- Raw HTML (or plain text) pages (with no Sandvox content) can be managed and edited
- Single toolbar popup for creating new pages or collections. Commonly used presets are included.
- Rather than a “pagelets” popup menu, there is a new “Objects” popup, for inserting content into the page or sidebar.
- Objects in a sidebar can be reordered in by dragging up or down
- Quickly access recently opened documents via the “Welcome” panel
Other Notes
- Link editing has moved into the Inspector, including when linking an image to a larger version of itself.
- Sandvox 2 documents have a new extension: .sandvox
- Opening an existing .svxSite document will prompt you to upgrade the document, saving it to a new location. (Your original .svxSite document is left untouched.)
- We have increased the granularity of how you edit raw HTML on a page. You can no longer edit the Raw HTML making up the entire text area, since that would conflict with the new flexibility over object positioning. Instead, insert Raw HTML objects within the page text as needed and enter your markup there.
- Edited HTML imported from existing documents will be left as-is, but the first time you edit the page, it will be cleaned up, resulting in a mix of regular text and Raw HTML objects. You can force this cleanup to happen at any time with the “Format → Advanced → Tidy HTML” menu command.
- Removed support for JS-Kit/Echo comments.