January 30, 2006

iWeb Sucks: Redux

Someone asked me to elaborate on why iWeb sucks.

Can you elaborate? iWeb is simple and it gets the job done...and it has some amazing growth potential for the future.

What's so bad about it?


Yes. It is worthless for anyone who has any HTML experience, existing web-sites that they want to edit, or podcasts they already have published and now want to publish through iWeb. They HTML that it codes is cumbersome, too large, and not standards compliant. NO HTML editor, cannot edit exisitng HTML documents or RSS feeds. Too reliant on .mac templates and publishing to .mac. Very difficult to publish elsewhere.

The also touted it on their web-site as a powerful web publishing tool.

iWeb, a new web-publishing application in iLife, makes it remarkably easy to create and publish websites including photo pages, movies, blogs, podcasts, and video podcasts.

Basically it is a software for people who are totally clueless about computers and the internet, but want to post pictures of the large fish they caught while on vacation. I was hoping for, based on how Apple promoted the product, something like the HTML editor in Mozilla or even similar to MS Frontpage.

Though the rest of the programs in iLife are great, though I don't use iDVD or iMovie, the podcasting improvements in Garageband are excellent.

Posted by psugrad98 at January 30, 2006 07:41 AM | TrackBack
Comments

So you are not in it's target audience. So are you saying that just because it doesn't allow HTML editing, it is not powerful? To a Soccer Mom, or a Teacher, the ability to make a web site, with your own pictures, podcasts, etc...without looking at a line of code, is powerful.

Sure, it seems like FIsher Price web publishing...but is that necessarily a bad thing?

Posted by: Mike Sassman at February 1, 2006 05:08 PM

Pessimist! First versions of software always are simplistic and have their drawbacks. The imortant thing is that it helps those who A., DON'T have knowledge of HTML to get their stuff on the Web and B., give existing developers of existing web publishing tools something to think about. More simplicity. It's NOT a bad thing! I code in Dreamweaver and the interface is not the prettiest to work through! Maybe this will give Adobe some food for though when developing Studio 9. Geez..

Posted by: John at February 15, 2006 11:59 PM

Google Maps