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The first outing, which for good or ill was created within one hour of launching iWeb 1.0.0.

iWeb is Apple’s new iLife-branded drag-and-drop-and-Apple-Feel-Good-Web-Development-Tool for the masses.

After 60 minutes with the product, there’s this:

Good:

It’s pretty much as drag and drop as Jobs demo’ed.

Nice forms. Always have to hand that to Apple.

Easy enough to use that (after proper setup) it will allow my Mom to enter the web publishing world. at last.

The media browser is probably speedy enough for most users libraries. Could scroll through my 24,000 photo iPhoto library without causing a kernel panic.

So so:

The WYSIWYG element is probably only 90% there.

A good number of spinny-lollipops encountered the first goround… and that’s on a site with like six pages.

Upload / publish speed to .Mac is marginal at best, but that has ever been the case with .Mac.

Ugly:

Lack of interactivity in the “blog”-type pages. It appears that authoring can only happen through iWeb. No comments. No ability to author new content through the web. For now. We’ll see about iLife 07.

Note: The elitist snob in me wants to say, “The ‘blog’ function in iWeb isn’t, in the least, blog-like”, but I’m keeping the jackheel down. For a .Mac user who has dreamed of having their own simple blog, but has lacked the capability until now, this will suffice, although it will probably get old fairly quick without the interactive element.

Publishing setup is non-trivial, considering this is an iApp. When you don’t have your “publish’ settings up right (at least this was true in my case), when you hit “publish” you just get an endless lollipop instead of a helpful dialogue such as, “Hey, I notice you’re not set up publish to any sort of meaningful web page. How about we help you out with that. Want to buy .Mac?”

Uh - can you actually see the page I linked above, without a .Mac account?

In any event… half a kudo to Apple for addressing a gap in their QoL-enhancing apps that’s only been there for five years or so. For a v1.0.0 app, could be lot worse, but there is work to do.

I’m sure by next revision (and the version number is, literally, 1.0.0. Couldn’t they have made it 1.5, just for fun?), in addition to the standard stability / performance increases we are used to seeing v3 (or 4… or 5) iApp products, we’ll see the standard Apple-visionary-my-god-I-never-knew-i-needed-that-feature, but-now-that-you-mention-it-hell-yeah stuff:

1) Lists of your most recent iTunes songs… including a special jelly button indicating the ones you illegally ripped.

2) iWeb Double-Ender Extension

3) iWeb Studio Space Explorer

4) iCowbell (wait… that’s another iApp… I’m getting off the topic of iWeb here)

5) iWeb Power Launcher

6) iWeb Setup Wizard v9X6

7) Real interactive blogs

Manual override for studio space exploration

9) Sports and sh*t.

10) Some other stuff re: Photocasting, which I haven’t quite figured out yet… but soon. Another entry. Because trust me… I have a lot of porn to share.

Respect,
rds