Earlier this week, Karelia released Sandvox 1.2.7. If you're unfamiliar, Sandvox is a great WYSIWYG website development application. It's really fun to use, and features .Mac and iLife integration, templates you'll actually want to put up on your site and a great user interface (in fact, it was the runner up in Apple's 2007 Design Awards for Best Mac OS X User Experience).

Version 1.2.7 is a minor update, but includes some important changes, like

• Improvements to iMedia Browser, including new movie thumbnailing code
• Graphical Title Text replacement now works again under Leopard
• Updates to the Digg pagelet

There's more, of course, and you can get the full run down here. Once you've got your Sandvox site up, share it at Sandvoxed.

Sandvox now requires 10.4.11 or 10.5.x, is a Universal Binary and comes in both pro ($79US) and "regular" ($49US) versions. Version 1.2.7 is a free upgrade for registered users.

A thoughtful post over at FactoryJoe.com asks whether the Web failed the iPhone. Apple's initial decision to support only Web 2.0 third-party apps on the iPhone gave the web-based community a huge shot of creativity and incentive to see how far they could push the iPhone and Safari in terms of delivering a new kind of third party development. Unfortunately the lack of persistent storage and local data, a la Google Gears, crippled the effort. Perhaps Apple's development model was simply a decade ahead of its time.

Chris Messina's article calls on Web developers to improve what's going on inside the browser frame by designing and constructing new web primitives that make it simpler and easier to build for the web. He adds that "Steve was right" in that Safari development is the future of application development. If Apple had invested in richer and better Web tools, the outcry for native third party apps might never have taken off.

Some might think that I hate iPhone specific websites based on this opinion piece I wrote in which said I hate iPhone specific websites. Actually, it didn't say anything of the sort, but many read it that way. The point I was trying to make was that crafting websites which use browser detection to only allow the iPhone in is a step in the wrong direction (Eric Meyer, CSS guru, agrees with me so I really can't be that wrong.). That being said, since I have long been a mobile Internet user I am all for variants of websites that work well on smaller screens.

The Iconfactory's Craig Hockenberry has penned a great article (the first in a two part) all about making your website shine on the iPhone. He covers everything a budding iPhone web developer should know (which boils down to, ';Use standards!'), and points out some specific iPhone tags and tricks that you can use on your site.

[via furbo.org]

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Joe Hewitt of joehewitt.com. A software engineer and web developer as well as a classically trained kazoo player, Hewitt is the man behind the latest iPhone development craze: iUI, the user interface software development kit for the iPhone. iUI, which is built using JavaScript and CSS, makes it easy for third party developers to create lickable iPhone websites that both look and, more importantly, feel like they were created natively as part of the iPhone.

To use iUI, you don't have to be a CSS or Javascript expert. iUI converts standard HTML source material into iPhone interface conventions, even taking advantage of native iPhone graphics. And, importantly, iUI continues to grow and develop as an open source project and as a topic of discussion at the iPhone Web Development Google Groups community.

It's being billed as "One-window web development," and from what we can tell, it looks pretty awesome. I only played with the demo briefly, so there's obviously a lot more to this app then you'll find here (Steven's blog is a good place to go for the full scoop).

First of all, the UI is beautiful. When first launched, Coda offers to import your Transmit favorites, which it did perfectly for me. It then "taped" each project if found in my copy of Transmit to the main window. To work on a project, just double click it and it "flips" into view. One more click logs into the project's remote files and displays them in the left hand sidebar. Select any file to begin working on it. Super easy and fast.

One more thing that needs to be mentioned, and I'm only scratching the surface here, is the "Books" feature. One click and you're brought to a virtual bookshelf that houses volumes on HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Click any book to begin "reading" it, and quickly jump to any topic you are particularly interested in just by clicking a keyword. You can also order hardcopy versions of any of the books.

Coda retails for $99 (lower introductory rates are available for now) and requires 10.4 or later. Now if you'll excuse me, I really want to stop typing and return to playing with Coda.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

With his post nominating apps for the upcoming Apple Design Awards (which we mentioned here), Scott Stevenson brought my attention to Locomotive from Ryan Rauum. Locomotive is an environment for developing Ruby on Rails applications on your Mac. It allows you to "try Ruby on Rails without worrying about breaking your current system - it's entirely self-contained." You just download it and "jump right into Rails development the minute you finish downloading." This seems a lot like MAMP, but for Ruby on Rails. So if you've ever wanted to try out Ruby on Rails (which is apparently how all the cool people are developing for Web 2.0) without the annoyances of getting Ruby and Rails properly set up, this is a perfect opportunity.

Locomotive is a free download from SourceForge, but donations are requested.

[Via Theocacao]

I've already revealed my fondness for the excellent and easy to use web development software RapidWeaver. One of the things that makes RapidWeaver so powerful is the number of excellent themes available for the software, both those built-in and those by third-parties (some free, some commercial). Now along comes To The Point Software with a new version of their RWThemeMiner theme "editing assistant." This neat little tool provides a nice little GUI front end for getting inside of and modifying RapidWeaver themes (the actual editing of images, etc. must be done in another appropriate application such as Photoshop, etc.). This lets you easily modify themes to meet your own purposes (for instance by adding custom graphics) without having to dig deep in the CSS and resource folders all on your own. Indeed it brings the GUI approach to editing themes in much the way that RapidWeaver itself brings it to editing web pages. Definitely worth a look if you're a RapidWeaver junkie like me.

RWThemeMiner is $15 shareware.

[Via Macminute]

While I'm sure the results will come as no surprise, I still wanted to do a roundup of our TUAW reader survey: What will you do with Windows on your Mac, as there were some interesting comments outside of the norm. Obviously, most of you are planning on using Windows solely to play games (which says something in and of itself about the utility of Windows), but I was more interested by the other uses you had in store, which include:

• AutoCAD/3D design
• .NET programming
• web development, testing IE sites
• those workplace-specific apps that simply don't have OS X counterparts - yet

One commenter, Yaknowho, also brought up the idea of using Windows on a Mac to run some of the larger apps that haven't gone Universal yet, like Photoshop. I actually just touched on this topic over at The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog, where I found a few tests that show the MacBook Pro (ironically) not only runs Windows faster than most Core Duo PC notebooks, it also runs Photoshop - under Windows - faster than the competition as well.

We live in a strange world when a Mac can run Windows faster than machines designed to run Windows.