Blueball Design Blog

August 29, 2011

Ed Brenner from supportcasts.com has put together an outstanding video tutorial showing all the good things you can do with our new Blueball FreeStack Add-Ons Pack #1 stacks with the FreeStack theme.

You can check out this free video here: http://supportcasts.com/freestacks-add-on-pack-1-free-public-video/

Ed keeps it simple but very informative and helpful as he goes through each of the 7 new stacks showing you how to set each one up and get the most use out of it. Ed also has a surprise to tell you about at the end of the video too.

Ed, Larry and Kevin have created a real gem in supportcasts.com for Rapidweaver users to check out. Be sure to subscribe today to get access to their vast library of videos and tutorials on all things Apple and Rapidweaver!

Best,
Charlie 

July 15, 2011

New Direction On Our Blueball Designs For Sandvox 2

After 6 months of trying on and off to rebuild several of our existing designs to work with all of Sandvox 2’s new features without success, and wasting weeks of time and effort, I have decided on a new direction for our existing Blueball Sandvox designs for Sandvox 2.

We will not be updating and adding Sandvox 2 design features to our current Blueball Sandvox design versions. The only updates they will receive, if required, are any needed css adjustments to their existing css files to make sure they display correctly in Sandvox 2. 

A lot of our current Blueball design versions will work perfectly with Sandvox 2.1 as they are in their current state. These designs are: 

Blueball Synergy
Blueball First Class
Blueball Minimal Colors
Blueball Quantum
Blueball Cubicle
Blueball Qubit
Blueball Focus
Blueball Ecom
Blueball Rezume
Blueball Pro Tabs

Our Blueball designs that will require very minor updates to their css files to get them to display perfectly in Sandvox 2 are:

Blueball Gravitas
Blueball White
Blueball Shadow
Blueball Snapshot
Blueball Smooth

The Blueball Trifecta design will require extensive updates to its css file and at this time, I am not 100% sure that it can be updated to work with Sandvox 2’s new layout architecture. I’m going to try my best to update it so it will display right in Sandvox 2. 

I am having to retire the Blueball Showcase design as Sandvox 2’s new layout architecture has completely broken it and it will not be possible to update it for Sandvox.

I will send out new versions of the 5 noted designs over the next 2-3 weeks to everyone starting with the Gravitas designs late next week. The other 4 will follow shortly thereafter.

I am also going to be updating our Blueball Sandvox designs web site with new Sandvox 2.1 demo sites for each design, and information during the next 3 weeks as well.

Our Plans For Future Sandvox 2 Design Development.

I was the very first third party design developer for Sandvox and have thoroughly enjoyed developing high quality original and unique designs for Sandvox 1.6.8 over the past 4+ years. It’s been a good run and the guys at Karelia have been great offering their support along the way. And I’ve got to say I think Sandvox 1.6.8 is an outstanding program and use it 3-4 times each week for site work.

However, the release of Sandvox 2 and it’s new layout architecture requires major changes in how you develop designs for it and the many new features in Sandvox 2 which I am having limited success at best working with now. Due to these changes and the fact that I prefer to use Sandvox 1.6.8 currently over Sandvox 2, I am going to take a break from developing new Sandvox 2 designs.

This break will allow me to hopefully become more familiar with Sandvox 2 and become more comfortable with the new code it requires for designs, and to start preferring to use it more than Sandvox 1.6.8. It’s very difficult to create products for a program that you don’t use much or like over the previous version, which is the conundrum I now find myself in.

I plan to revisit Sandvox 2 later this year and hope to be back with some new design releases for Sandvox 2 at that time.

At Blueball Design It’ll Still Be Business As Usual.

In the meantime, we’ll still be open for business like we have for the past almost 30 years, with our existing Blueball Sandvox designs available for purchase at our Blueball Sandvox designs site, and will continue to offer support for all of them for existing and future buyers of our Blueball Sandvox designs.

Thanks in advance for your continued support and understanding on our new direction and Blueball Sandvox 2 design updates.

Best,
Charlie

May 10, 2011

We were initially struck by the striking and clean professional layout of www.lanemoses.com. But then the depth of the site and all the extras built into it made us sit up and say “wow what a Rapidweaver site!”

This site was made using Rapidweaver, the Stacks page plugin, and our Blueball FreeStack theme and stacks. Be sure to go down a few levels to check out all that was added into the pages.

May 4, 2011

Blueball Design released major updates today to their two very popular FontStylr and FontStylr User’s Choice stacks bundles.

These free updates include a complete rewrite and recoding of each FontStylr stacks in the two bundles and features the following:

• Added new h tag sizing slider option in the hud window area for all FontStylr stacks. You can now specify the size from h1 to h5 for any FontStylr stack text. The default size is set to h1.

• Updated all FontStylr stacks to latest Stacks plugin version. New FontStylr stacks require Stacks 1.4+. Will not work with older versions of Stacks plugin any longer.

• Added in new Cufon script for Internet Explorer 9. FontStylr stacks custom font styles now display correctly in Internet Explorer 9.

• Renamed all link enabled versions of FontStylr stacks. You can now load and use both non-link enabled and link enabled FontStylr stacks at the same time.

• New template.html file. Streamlined and more compact code for faster display.

• Added new placeholder text in each stack that is easier to select and replace.

• Added new css file to the resources folder on each FontStylr stack.

• Updated call to jQuery to version 1.5.2.

• New improved Info.plist file added to each FontStylr stack.

• Each FontStylr stack now validates strict as long as a unique div name is used for each instance of a FontStylr stack used on a single site page.

• Updated all readme files.

• Added new plain text file listing all font names by volume to use in the font name hud field.

• Updated a couple of FontStylr name snippets.

A couple of important items to note on the new v6.0 FontStylr stacks:

• Due to renaming of all link enabled FontStylr stacks, you will have to replace any older link enabled FontStylr stacks you may have in place currently on your Rapidweaver site pages with the new v6.0 link enabled stacks.

• Non-link enabled FontStylr stacks do not need to be replaced.

We tried to add in the most requested feature additions we could that FontStylr stack users had submitted to us. If you have additional feature requests you’d like to see added in please email them to us.

May 2, 2011

I wanted to let all our loyal Blueball Sandvox design customers know where we are at on updating our designs for Sandvox 2.

To be perfectly candid about everything regarding updating our designs for Sandvox 2, our update process on Sandvox 2 has been off to a very slow start so far. Only in the last several weeks has there been a Sandvox 2 beta version that I could accurately test design updates against that actually worked for me here, and that had all the features enabled to work with for updating purposes.

That said, unfortunately it’s going to take a long time to complete all our design updates for Sandvox 2. Due to Sandvox 2’s new layout system and structure, I’m basically going to have to recreate each design from scratch all over again for Sandvox 2.

Bottom line, I plan to update all our 17 (170+ designs counting the color versions of each) individual Blueball designs for Sandvox 2. Realistically I’m looking at between 7-9 months minimum at least to complete and release all the updates. No way around it and nothing I can do about the time frame unfortunately.

Thanks in advance for your patience while we work through all the updates. If I can get the updates ready sooner I will, but I have to make sure that the design updates for Sandvox 2 are right first, and display and perform as expected, before I send them out to everyone.

We will still have all our Sandvox 1.6 versions of our existing Sandvox designs available and the updates to the Sandvox 2 versions will be free for all buyers of Sandvox 1.6 designs.

In closing this has been an extremely trying and frustrating experience for me personally as a theme developer. I’ve never experienced a program update that required this much updating to existing templates (designs) to make them work as expected with a new version. I hope to release our first update in the next 2-3 weeks.

Best,
Charlie Lockhart