Karelia Software

Sandvox users who are wondering if they should upgrade to Leopard just yet may want to hear about Sandvox and graphical text titles — titles that are rendered as a graphical image by Sandvox.

We've found a bug in the initial release of Leopard, on several kinds of Intel-based Macs, that causes these graphical titles to be either colored oddly or nearly invisible. We have reported the bug to Apple — they already know about it, and will be using the testing harness we provided to help isolate and fix the problem. Soon, we hope!

So, until Apple can fix the bug and release an update to Leopard, this feature is just not going to work for many users. If your website uses this feature and you haven't upgraded yet to Leopard, you may want to wait. If you have already installed Leopard and you need to update your site, we recommend that you temporarily turn off the checkbox "Replace titles with graphical text" from the Site → Media inspector. Your title will be visible, but just not look as cool. We'll announce here when Apple has released a version of Leopard that works properly with this feature, so you can turn this feature back on and re-publish your site.

Sandvox ships with over forty designs, many of them customizable, but there is sometimes a need to adapt one of our designs for a truly unique look for your website.  Thomas Green did just that.  This morning on our Yahoo! discussion group for Sandvox, he announced that he has posted a wonderful tutorial (PDF) on modifying the "minimalist" design that comes with Sandvox.  Thanks, Thomas, for making such a useful resource available!

We have just bumped up Sandvox to a new version, 1.2.3, ready for download. 

This release hasn't changed much on the surface from the last version, but we have improved a lot "under the hood." We have made some optimizations that greatly speed up performance when publishing large sites. Many of our beta testers have been pleased with the speedups in opening and navigating sites with hundreds of images. We have also improved the handling of images embedded with text, to speed up processing and fix a few bugs.

Some other updates of interest:

• Many of our designs have been refreshed for better compatibility with Internet Explorer version 7. It is probably worth re-publishing your Sandvox site so that visitors using IE 7 will have a better view of your website.
• We've added automatic support for PicLens, a Safari plugin that generates full-screen slideshows that we mentioned in our last mailing, in all photo albums and photo weblogs.
• We've added some initial support for .Mac "personal domains" (see the Help pages for this).