When Apple enters your industry, you sit up and take notice. Especially when it’s your job to make simple, beautiful, elegant websites, and to make it easy for folks to keep them updated. And Apple releases a product that enables everyday folks to do just that. So is iWeb a threat to my job?
Nope, not at all. I am actually somewhat surprised Apple even released it at this point. It doesn’t even seem like a finished product. Here is a brief, and surely incomplete, list of its shortcomings.
- You can only publish to a .mac account. Period. You have the option to publish to a folder on your computer, and then manually upload it to a web server… But seriously. How many of iLife’s target users are going to do that?
- Because you can only publish on .mac, you get URLs like this: http://web.mac.com/brigleb/iWeb/. Ugly!
- Likely Apple considers this a feature, but you can’t even see your source code. If Safari lets me see my source, then iWeb should let me edit it.
- The cover of the iLife box proudly proclaims Music. Photos. Movies. Blogs. One would hardly count the blog features of iLife on par with music or photos, given how underpowered the blog features are. With no real server-side support, visitors cannot even leave comments. And RSS feeds only work out-of-the-box with, you guessed it, your .mac account.
- Not least of all is the fact that the source code that iWeb generates is abhorrent. Granted, not even Dreamweaver generates terrific code, and probably no program can, but the code from iWeb is like something out of the Nineties. Not good.
Anyway, the templates are fairly neat and pretty, and it’s probably great for some folks. But nothing earth-shattering here. And yes, we’ll be keeping our day jobs!
