Ever since I started using a Mac a year ago, I was always amazed at how everything just worked. There wasn’t any tinkering required with registry settings, or config files, or installing tons of drivers. Everything just worked. For the advanced users or the folks who wanted to hack around, you could open up the terminal and start hacking away at config files. Apple did an amazing job with the software and hardware …. until iLife ’06.
I have to say, this is probably the worst $80 I spent since I cancelled my gym membership. PhotoCasting, Apple’s much hyped visual streaming answer to podcasting breaks RSS and doesn’t work with anything other than Safari. iWeb is even worse. Everyone’s been talking about how iWeb replaces Apple’s old homepage publishing from iPhoto, etc. Well, it doesn’t import any of your old homepage pages, it doesn’t allow you to customize any of the published pages. For example, I’m a user of Google Analytics and wanted to modify the resulting HTML output from iWeb so that I can get some basic analytics for the iWeb site. No big deal, run through iWeb, publish, edit the HTML or iDisk and resync. Sounds easy and it is, until you publish a new page or edit an existing page. iWeb republishes EVERY page when you publish a new page or edit an existing one, or even just publish a new group of photos from iPhoto. No way, I’m going to edit EVERY html file EVERY time and add in the lines required for Google Analytics.
iWeb sure brings back terrible memories of Frontpage back in 1996. Come on Apple, what happened here??