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iWeb 06

I'm back from a long absence, ready to blog about the latest in educational technology. I am currently working in a Mac shop, even though I do a lot of Windows documentation, so my posts on this blog will probably focus mostly on Mac applications and tips.

Today, I am going to provide some first impressions of my experiences using the iWeb application Apple added to iLife 06. iLife 06 was released in early January at the same event where Steve Jobs introduced the first Intel based Macs. iWeb is a good idea, but this is a case where the implementation falls short. I think teachers will really like how easy it is to create a web page with iWeb. The program has a lot of features for the beginner:

* guides: these can be set in the preferences to appear automatically whenever you want to align two objects based on their edges or their center points. I like how the guides work automatically. You don't have to drag them from a toolbar or anything. They are there just when you need them, then they go away once you have your objects aligned.

* very nice integrated imaging features: You have the same image adjust button that you have in iPhoto and you can use it to adjust an image's sharpness, exposure, brightness, and more without having to open another program. There's also a built-in histogram so you can see how your changes in the adjust panel affect the color information in the image. The image adjust button panel uses Dashboard technology and is semi-transparent.


iWeb introduces some nifty image effects, such as the ability to have a reflection at the bottom of your images. You can even control the opacity of the reflection. Also, you can use one of the inspectors to rotate your image in small increments. The two effects can be used in combination to create some nice looking effects.

Just like Pages and Keynote, iWeb supports masking of images. This gives you an alternative to cropping when you only want to show part of an image on your web page. Unlike cropping, masking is non-destructive. The image information is still on the page, it's just hidden from view.

* easy to do layers: There are buttons in the toolbar at the bottom that allow you to move items to the back or bring them to the front with a single click of the mouse. You can use this feature (also available in iWork apps) to create complex layouts without knowing any CSS coding.

* consistent interface with other new Apple applications, such as Keynote and Pages: That means that if you already know how to use one of those apps it will not take you long to learn iWeb. Just like the iWork apps, iWeb uses inspectors for changing most settings on your page.

* beautiful templates: The included templates allow you to create a very professioinal looking site in a matter of minutes. They include plenty of placeholder images that you choose to leave in your layout or easily replace with a drag and drop from the new Media Chooser.

* new Media Chooser: The new Media Chooser makes it a snap to add multimedia content and photos to a web page created in iWeb. You just drag and drop the image you want to use over a placeholder image and when you release the mouse it will be added to the page with the dimensions of the placeholder. Adding movies and audio (podcasts) is just as easy.

* strong integration with other iLife apps: in iPhoto, you can select an album and then choose Share, Send to iWeb, and iWeb will create a beautiful looking photo gallery in a matter of seconds. It will even include a slideshow button your visitors can click on to view a very slick Ajax-powered slideshow (this will only work with a .Mac account, if you do not have a .Mac account there will be a slideshow button but it will display an HTML slideshow). The same integration is available in Garageband and iMovie. With Garageband, you can select Share, Send to iWeb to quickly create a podcast page that includes an RSS link your visitors can use to subscribe to your podcast.

And now for the bad:

* The code created by iWeb looks horrible. In his keynote, Steve Jobs mentioned that the code is standards compliant. Yes, it is standards compliant code, but the way it is implemented makes maintaining iWeb sites a nightmare. Most of the style information is inline. iWeb does not give you the option of storing your style information in a separate file, which would make updating and maintaining a website much more efficient (there would only be one place where you would change the style information and it would be reflected in all the pages that link to the stylesheet file). Another problem is that the program creates a bunch of empty div tags that are unneccessary and bloat the code.

* There is no way to access the source code (at least that I have found) within the program. Sometimes, it's much faster to go into the source code to fix a problem, and sometimes it's the only way to fix a problem. Then again, when you consider how bad the code created with iWeb is, maybe not being able to access it is not a bad thing.

* Publishing sometimes takes a long time. Each time you publish a site (which you can do to either your .Mac account or to a folder you can upload to another host), it publishes all the sites you're working on. I think it would be nice to have the option to publish each site individually.

* The sites created with iWeb are very big. The program creates very graphics-intensive sites. I noticed this when I first tried to upload a site to my web server. I created a very small site, and it still ended up requiring almost 400 files to be uploaded to the server. So, while the templates look great, they do require a bunch of images.

* There is no option to create navigation down the side of the pages. You can only have navigation (which is created automatically from your page names) at the top of the page. I found this to be too restricting.

* I found that the program tends to create a lot of text as images, which we know is an accessibility problem and makes editing with another program a problem.

* The blogging feature does not allow you to add comments, so you're missing a big part of the blogging experience. I hope they add this feature via an update really soon. I like how iWeb does a good job of tracking the stories in the blog and updating the archive page it creates, but commenting is a big part of blogging that needs to be incorporated into the program.


So, there you have it. These are my first impressions of iWeb, which I have used to create a couple of sites already. I used it to create a quick site for my daughter's preschool. I did it for free, so I wanted to do it fairly quickly, and iWeb was perfect for that. This is not a site that will change a lot, so the problems with updating sites are not that big a deal. I think iWeb may also be useful as a tool for sketching out how you want a website to look (instead of doing it in Photoshop). I would still create the actual site with another editor such as the free Nvu .

I know that many of the choices made by Apple with iWeb are based on their intended audience for this program. Many teachers will like the ease of use of this application at first, but once they get somewhat experienced at creating websites with it, I think they will move to something else because of the limitations. For my money, Nvu is still a better program for beginning web designers than iWeb, and the price is better (free!). This is the editor I am using with my students in my Internet in Education class right now. I will do a review of it soon. Nvu creates very good, clean code and it gives you the option to store your style information in a separate file. It does not have any templates you can use, so it requires a bit more work, but you also have more flexibility and control.

Customizing Windows

I am a big fan of the Stardock programs. Right now I am using WindowBlinds, which customizes the toolbars and dialog boxes. This program allows you to make your PC toolbars look like Mac toolbars, down to the placement of the close window button and even the roll window behavior (where the Window is rolled up to show only the title and the Window management buttons when you double click on the title bar). Why would you want to do this?...Well, because it can be done. If you spend a lot of time on the computer, if you are a web designer or programmer like me, it gets boring looking at the same old boring desktop. A little variety is good.

WindowBlinds is the skinning application. I also use Object Dock, a very capable dock-type application for Windows. One of the things I really like about Macs is the dock. I like having all of my links in one easy to find place and I use the Quick Launch bar in Windows all the time to access my programs. But Object Dock is so much cooler. It even has the bouncing animation that lets you know a program is opening up.

The other program I really like in this suite is DesktopX. DesktopX is very similar to Konfabulator (originally only for the Mac but now a version for Windows has been released...I'll do a short review soon.) DesktopX consists of a series of widgets that appear on the desktop. They include memory, cpu and network monitors, calendars and some really nice looking analog clocks. The best thing is that it doesn't consume a lot of memory.

Right now I have WindowBlinds, ObjectDock, DesktopX and CursorXP (another Stardock application that allows you to have animated cursors) and my computer is running just fine with 512MB of RAM. All of these applications are highly customizable and some like DesktopX make it very easy to build your own widgets and objects.

Some of the applications in the suite, such as CursorXP and ObjectDock are available for free, while some are available in both free and paid (Enhanced) versions. All of the applications allow you to add objects from an extensive library created by other users. This library is available at www.wincustomize.com, where you will also find skins for many other applications such as mp3 players and the like.

I highly recommend the Stardock applications if you want to add some bling bling to your Windows desktop.

Link: Stardock Corporation