CocoaHeads Homework: Sandvox 1.1

I know everyone who's reading this and is within driving distance of Apple is coming to CocoaHeads tonight. Why? Because you want to talk to other people who write Mac OS X software. You're also coming because you want to hear about the development of Sandvox, and possibly win a free copy.

So here's your homework. Download a copy of the absolutely brand-new (twelve hours ago new) Sandvox 1.1 and play around with it a bit. Come up with a list of difficult questions to keep Dan busy. Seriously, I want to see him so stumped that he has to phone a friend.

Let me get you started. Sandvox is a web site management tool that covers some of the same ground that iWeb does but goes several steps beyond. It's an incredibly polished application — the user interface is gorgeous. Among the best of any third-party Mac OS X application.

Quick Tour

To get a real feel for the thing you should watch the screencast, but here's quick roundup of the user interface.

The Pages toolbar item gives you a handful of page types to work with. Regular text content, photo pages, contact forms, custom HTML, and so on:



Pagelets are embedded modules which have their own logic independent of the containing page. RSS feeds, Del.icio.us bookmark lists, embedded contact forms, and more:



Collections are running lists of content with a single template. The content for a collection is managed like a folder.



Here's a photo album in action:



Links can be created with a drag action. The effect on this is really nice. Make sure to just hold the string still for a minute and watch the subtle floating animation:



You can choose the look of the site as a whole from the Designs strip along the top.



You can get five additional themes by registering for the Karelia mailing list.

Technical Details

Sandvox is technically quite a piece of work. It makes extensive use of Tiger API, such as Core Data, Core Image and the content editing features of WebKit.

It's also a real third party code success story. Open up Help > Acknowledgements to see the whole list, including RBSplitView, Cocoa Tech classes, Greg Hulands's Connection FTP framework, iMedia Browser, a bunch of stuff from Uli Kusterer, and more.

So get to it.

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