Sandvox is a new solution for those of us who want a website but don't want to either wrestle with strings of HTML or CSS, or can't be bothered to learn the fundamentals of web design using an application such as Dreamweaver.
Like Realmac Software's RapidWeaver, the way you build your pages is simple - it's basically a process of picking a template and replacing the boilerplate text and sample media with your own. Although there's some flexibility, particularly with the Pagelets concept, the template-based approach doesn't lend itself to very personalised layouts. This is one area where the largely disappointing iWeb is actually a good choice, as it allows you to drag and layer page elements at will.
However, Sandvox's method will be sufficient for many users, particularly given the richness of the supplied themes. There's no reason, given the application's good use of CSS, for templates to look flat and boxy; indeed, some of the themes included in the package are really bold and bright. After purchase, you're invited to register to download a further five for free.
It's certainly easy to build your site. Pick page types from the drop-down menu - ranging from basic styled text pages to PHP-driven contact forms, by way of photo and movie pages - and Sandvox adds them to your site, building the navigation automatically as it goes. The Pro version also includes the ability to add chunks of raw HTML to build pages, so although Sandvox isn't intended as a tool for building rich, dynamic sites, you could use it to pull in dynamic content using these HTML pages.
Where RapidWeaver requires you to add content in a separate editing view before switching to Preview to check layout, Sandvox uses Mac OS X's built-in web engine to allow you to enter information directly onto the page. This is nice and immediate, but it began to feel a little sluggish on our test iBook G4.
While many users will be happy to publish after only going this far, Sandvox does offer more options. You can create page 'collections' - master pages that then 'contain' subpages. A good example is Sandvox's implementation of photo albums, in which you create a photo album collection and then add single, standalone photo pages to it. The photo album collection automatically shows thumbnails of the dedicated single photos pages it contains.
This is also the way Sandvox handles blogging, but in this respect it feels a good deal more contrived. Although it supports comments and trackbacks courtesy of the free (with paid-for upgrade) Haloscan system, this isn't an ideal blogging tool. For one thing, you're limited to posting only from your computer - rather then from any Internet-enabled computer worldwide, as with hosted services such as Blogger or WordPress - and it does feel clumsy. It's fine for the occasional news update on a small business site, but little else.
Where Sandvox does shine, though, is in its unique Pagelets concept. These are little page elements that can be added to the sidebar or into the main body as 'callouts', and can really give your pages richness. The list of available Pagelet types includes little contact forms, Flickr panels to pull in photos from a particular Flickr account or tag, del.icio.us lists, RSS feeds, styled text and, in the Pro version, HTML, allowing for the easy placement of advertisements and other more dynamic content. These can be added, configured and reordered at will.
Indeed, if you bring up the Inspector palette, you'll discover plenty of more advanced options for the site, page and Pagelet, including setting character encoding, automatically rendering exotic fonts as a flat graphic, and adding elements to the page's HEAD.
However, it's when it comes to publishing your site that things really start to fall apart. Publishing to .Mac works just fine, and you're given the option to 'publish' to your Mac to host the site yourself, but trying to configure a third-party hosting account is a good deal more fraught. It's not so much the slightly tricky configuration, but that when the site is published, assets seem to either get mixed up (showing the wrong photo thumbnails, for example) or lost entirely. This happened a few times with the style sheet, so the site lost its styling information.
Worse, Sandvox crashed three times during the first two hours of use. There's bags of potential in this application, and we eagerly await a more mature and stable version. In its current state, though, it's just too unreliable. Roll on Sandvox 1.4.
Verdict
There's bags of potential in this application, and we eagerly await a more mature and stable version. In its current state, though, it's just too unreliable.
Author: Christopher Phin
MacUser Online