iWeb and .Mac: I'll pass... at least for now
February, 08 2006 08:11 AM Filed in: Review
Most avid Mac
users know by now that the introduction of iLife 06
brought with it a new application: iWeb. I've given
it a spin along side of a demo account of .Mac and
I'll pass on both. I can sum up the experience with
one word: yuck.
I used .Mac during it's first year as a paid product but did not renew. My feelings then as now, I like the concept and the features but not the performance. Terrible even on broadband. While I generally like the Finder in OS X this does not apply to the use of .Mac's iDisk which makes the Finder (and me) crawl up into a little ball and cry. I've painted whole houses in the time it takes anything show up in my iDisk. It's not even close to acceptable. Uploading files? Yes, that's me sobbing in the corner again. In my attempts anything larger than a couple of megabytes proved to be a task akin to finding Mulder's abducted sister (you do watch X-Files reruns, don't you?). Uploading an iWeb site? The same.
I really do like the advertised features but without speedy performance features are pointless.
I've used iWeb for a couple hours and followed this up with browsing the Apple iWeb discussion forums to confirm my experience. As a 1st version iWeb is off to a slow start. It could be much worse. But it could be better. The included templates are very nice and adding content to those templates to create my own site could not have been easier. Given that the intended users are folks who do not design websites this is perfect. I'd like to be able to customize but I realize that's not really the intent.
The real problem with iWeb seems to be the size of the sites it outputs. Huge. My test site was fairly minimal. A couple pages, a blog with 2 entries, and 2 small photo pages: 7.1 MB. As a comparison I created sites in Sandvox (still in beta) and RapidWeaver. Both came out to around 1 MB. The problem seems to be iWeb's graphics output. While some images are optimized others are not. That's crazy. No website creation app should output images that have not been optimized. Apple should not assume every user has a broadband connection. I opened my iWeb site on a dial-up connection and yes, I ended up falling asleep while I waited for the pages to load. I woke up and still had time to take the dog out for a walk. Then I made lasagna from scratch. Even on a broadband the pages were slow to load.
As of now I'll pass and I would not recommend the .Mac/iWeb solution for any of my family or any client. Apple products are supposed to be top of class and this combination is not.
The good news is that these problems are fixable and there's great potential here. A company the size of Apple can make .Mac work if it so chooses. iWeb, in its next version will be improved I'm sure. Maybe even a few incremental upgrades in the next few months might do the trick.
If you really want to set up a simple to use site now my suggestion would be RapidWeaver and a standard site hosting service. Alternatively there are free and paid blogging services that are very easy to use. Some of these, such as TypePad, have built in photo galleries. If your primary goal is to share images in your iPhoto library then Flickr is an excellent option. Download the free Flickr Export plug-in and you'll see that iPhoto already works very well with Flickr.
Technorati Tags: iWeb, .Mac, iLife
I used .Mac during it's first year as a paid product but did not renew. My feelings then as now, I like the concept and the features but not the performance. Terrible even on broadband. While I generally like the Finder in OS X this does not apply to the use of .Mac's iDisk which makes the Finder (and me) crawl up into a little ball and cry. I've painted whole houses in the time it takes anything show up in my iDisk. It's not even close to acceptable. Uploading files? Yes, that's me sobbing in the corner again. In my attempts anything larger than a couple of megabytes proved to be a task akin to finding Mulder's abducted sister (you do watch X-Files reruns, don't you?). Uploading an iWeb site? The same.
I really do like the advertised features but without speedy performance features are pointless.
I've used iWeb for a couple hours and followed this up with browsing the Apple iWeb discussion forums to confirm my experience. As a 1st version iWeb is off to a slow start. It could be much worse. But it could be better. The included templates are very nice and adding content to those templates to create my own site could not have been easier. Given that the intended users are folks who do not design websites this is perfect. I'd like to be able to customize but I realize that's not really the intent.
The real problem with iWeb seems to be the size of the sites it outputs. Huge. My test site was fairly minimal. A couple pages, a blog with 2 entries, and 2 small photo pages: 7.1 MB. As a comparison I created sites in Sandvox (still in beta) and RapidWeaver. Both came out to around 1 MB. The problem seems to be iWeb's graphics output. While some images are optimized others are not. That's crazy. No website creation app should output images that have not been optimized. Apple should not assume every user has a broadband connection. I opened my iWeb site on a dial-up connection and yes, I ended up falling asleep while I waited for the pages to load. I woke up and still had time to take the dog out for a walk. Then I made lasagna from scratch. Even on a broadband the pages were slow to load.
As of now I'll pass and I would not recommend the .Mac/iWeb solution for any of my family or any client. Apple products are supposed to be top of class and this combination is not.
The good news is that these problems are fixable and there's great potential here. A company the size of Apple can make .Mac work if it so chooses. iWeb, in its next version will be improved I'm sure. Maybe even a few incremental upgrades in the next few months might do the trick.
If you really want to set up a simple to use site now my suggestion would be RapidWeaver and a standard site hosting service. Alternatively there are free and paid blogging services that are very easy to use. Some of these, such as TypePad, have built in photo galleries. If your primary goal is to share images in your iPhoto library then Flickr is an excellent option. Download the free Flickr Export plug-in and you'll see that iPhoto already works very well with Flickr.
Technorati Tags: iWeb, .Mac, iLife
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