iWeb 09: First Look

OK, the Keynote is over and I guess there’s no big surprises left. The new MacBook Pro (17-inch) with unibody construction is really nice, the non-replacable battery not so nice. New versions of iWork with new themes aplenty for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Phil went over that a bit. New version of iLife with really cool changes in iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand all stroked quite nicely during the Keynote. Oh and a new version of iWeb that Phil said…wait…Phil didn’t really say too much about iWeb.

That’s a shame and I mean to rectify that right here because while the changes in iWeb were few, they were very significant. There were a few flaws in iWeb’s execution that required many work-arounds. Things like directly publishing to your own domain. It required you to publish to your own disk and to update you essentially had to re-upload EVERYTHING. Once your site gets to a certain size, this could be very bad in both time and hitting your upload limits depending on who your site is hosted by. Another problem was that it was very difficult to manage different sites as iWeb put everything into a single Domain file which meant that when you updated online, again you had to update everything.

These are two problems that the new version of iWeb should easily take care of. iWeb has FTP support built directly into it which makes that part of your online administration MUCH easier to deal with. I can’t speak how well it works as it won’t be released until the end of January, but at a first glance it should be pretty good. In the past your two choices were to either publish locally or to dotmac (now MobileMe). A third choice has been added which naturally is called FTP. Very easy to use with about as small a learning curve as FTP could be without compromising what it’s used for. Once your site is published, subsequent uploads will only do whatever changes have been made so you won’t waste time or bandwidth. This is something that should have been included in either the first or second revisions of iWeb, but Apple is/was pushing the paid dotmac/MobileMe service so it isn’t hard to understand why it wasn’t there before. This makes most of the tips I wrote about before in my iWeb articles redundant and unnecessary. That’s not a bad thing as any changes that makes whatever the software is there to help you with easier is a change for the better.

One other major change is that if you have multiple sites that you are administering in iWeb, you can decide which sites you want to upload and can even have different options for each site as in maybe having one publish to your local hard drive, one go to MobileMe, and the third being uploaded via FTP to your own domain. Only the site you want to update will be published.

Just by adding these two minor changes, it seems Apple is finally acknowledging that Mac users cannot live by dotmac or MobileMe alone. These are two very welcome changes and will make life easier for the regular iWeb user.

At a glance there are two other changes to iWeb that will open up the program or at least make it more attractive to other users. One is a new Countdown widget which lets you add a countdown widget (duh) to any page. of more importance is a FaceBook feature that will update your FaceBook account to let your friends know when you have made changes to your site (if that’s something you’re going to want to do).

All in all, the new features added to iWeb, while certainly not game changing, are very welcome and those who use iWeb will certainly find it worth the update.