Karelia have just released their first public beta of the long-awaited Sandvox website creation software, ahead of recent rumours that Apple releasing similar software entitled “iWeb” tomorrow, which could (well, will) threaten their new venture. For their sake, I hope the rumours are untrue. Karelia have been shot down once before when Apple, who developed a clone of their popular “Watson” internet search software, by developing their own, entitled “Sherlock“, and gave it away for free. The full story is available on their blog.
To return to the release of Sandvox, I have had a brief play with it, and if you’re a Mac user and run a small website you must give it a go. This is the closest piece of web design software to WYSIWYG nirvana that I have seen. It uses Apple’s editable WebKit, and CoreImage, to great effect - no ‘blind’ preview pages with cumbersome preview stages, but pure in-place editing. The supplied templates contain some elegant designs as well as some awful ones - but that’s just down to personal taste.
Bear in mind that this is a beta, and there are no instructions bar a basic introduction, but do go ahead and download it. Give them your support!
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A number of Apple Mac wikis appear to be cropping up. The first one that I came across is Wikitosh which hopes to be a repository for everything you ever wanted to know about the Apple Mac platform, from todays Macs and OSX, back to information about machines from days gone by (computer archaeology?!).
Wikitosh has information of varying quality. One fantastic example is the section on Apple’s industrial design - “Jonathan Ive RULES at industrial Design!!” - is the sole entry. For some reason they have some odd conventions. Software is named SoftWare. Hardware is HardWare. I don’t like that one bit. Wikitosh has a long way to go before it becomes a mature source of information - and that, of course, is up to (literate) people contributing to and self-moderating it.
The second Mac Wiki is Mac Guides, which was recently set up by Mac Rumors, the popular Mac news and rumours website. Rather than being over-ambitious, Mac Guides aims to “provide an organized outlet for the vast amounts of knowledge that are provided in the forums“. That means tutorials, solutions to common problems etc. This could help with the problem of repetition, and useful information becoming buried in their burgeoning (but extremely useful) forums.
Keep your eyes on both - and remember to contribute something useful to help build a resource which benfits all Mac users.
Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, macguides, osx, guides, wiki, wikitosh
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For those lucky Mac users across the globe - 10.4.3 should appear in your software update list as of today (well, depending which side of the International Date Line you are).
I installed it on my PowerBook this afternoon, and all was fine, except once major issue. The update had deleted my monitor calibration files. I was stuck with the message “The factory profile for the display could not be found” when I tried to recalibrate, and everything was horribly bright, washed out, with a purple cast.
I restarted (cue sharp intake of breath) twice, and it seemed to then magically reincarnate my monitor profiles, and all is well again.
So - moral of the day for people experiencing odd behaviour on their Macs after installing the OSX 10.4.3 update - restart. If that doesn’t work, restart again…
Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, osx, 10.3.4
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I recently bought a copy of RapidWeaver by Realmac Software to use for a number of mini websites which will be delivered on CD.
I first looked at it some time ago (I think it was at version 2.x) and was deeply unimpressed - it lacked style, usability, and was too limiting for websites beyond a basic “Hello World” personal website. Version 3.1 arrived, and, well, what a change. RapidWeaver, once you get used to the semi-WYSIWYG editor (you can’t see any of your site navigation or design in the editor, only basic text styling), and discover the page inspector, you’ve actually got a lovely website creation tool.
RapidWeaver really isn’t software you would use to design a site from scratch, with your own design, but if you would like to make an elegant site based on well designed templates, then RapidWeaver is a good choice. It’s worth noting that you are able to customise the supplied themes if you have the know-how (which is fortunate for me, as I do - if you don’t you’ll have to use the templates as-is).
Continue reading ‘Rapidweaver 3.2 beta’
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Ecto is a fully-featured desktop blogging application, that helps you get the most out of your blog. It allows you to manage your blog using a fully OSX integrated interface, compose posts offline, integration with iPhoto, manage your pings and trackbacks, and support for multiple blogs using multiple blogging engines. Its burgeoning list of features make this an essential tool for bloggers.
In this mini-review I am using ecto 2.3.7 for OSX.
Continue reading ‘Ecto: The Review’
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I first posted about Ecto back in May, and, after much playing with the demo for OSX, I have bitten the bullet and purchased a copy. The more I use Ecto, the more powerful I realise it is. I will post a full review here in the days to come, but I really couldn’t recommend it enough. Even the support forums for Ecto are checked regularly by the author.
Check back soon for my review.
Technorati Tags: ecto, blogging, wysiwyg
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Karelia Software are soon to be releasing a novel new app for designing websites, that levers the best of Tiger’s new technologies such as CoreImage and the newly open-sourced WebKit. It is slated for release during Q3 2005, and will feature drag and drop assembly from other applications, easy publishing, RSS generation and an extensible plugin architecture.
Continue reading ‘Sandvox’
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Apple announced at the WWDC conference on Monday 6 June that it would be using Intel CPUs in forthcoming Macintosh computers from 2006. How might this affect the future of the Mac and OSX?
At about 6.30pm GMT, Steve Jobs announced on stage at WWDC that the rumours were true. Apple were moving the Mac platform to Intel CPUs, beginning now. A brave move.
Technorati Tags: apple, intel, osx, powerpc
Continue reading ‘Apple and Intel’
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A nice chap called Nigel Kersten has written a nifty little widget for Apple OSX Tiger’s Dashboard called RapidMetaBlog. It’s nicely designed, in terms of look and functionality. Panes slide out from the compact widget, allowing plenty of space to write your post (I’m writing this in it), and another pane slides out from the post to show a preview.
RapidMetaBlog supports categories, essential functionality if you like to keep a tight structure on your blog. When writing your post, you have to use HTML, but for simple jottings, it’s very handy indeed. All you need is paragraph tags (remember to close them!), and perhaps an href here and there. You can’t insert images at this time (unless they’re already online, and you know the URI), but then this is supposed to be a widget, not a full-featured weblog editor like Ecto or MarsEdit.
I’ll post some screenshots later.
You can download RapidMetaBlog from Nigel’s blog or from Dashboard Widgets.
Continue reading ‘RapidMetaBlog’
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Apple’s nifty new operating system OSX 10.4 Tiger has a version of the Oxford American Dictionary (the American edition of the OED, of course) installed by default. It’s great - you can access it from the Dashboard, so it’s there in the blink of an eye, or you can invoke it at any time if you are using a Cocoa program such as Safari, by hoving your cursor over a word, and pressing ctrl-command-d. It also has a thesaurus, which is handy. I spotted on Scott Moschella’s Plastic Bugs that looking up the word "blog" brought an amusing definition: 
I’m not American! I demand that it’s update to include us Brits too!
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