iWeb 2 Wish List
 
 
It’s just over two days until His Steveness begins his Keynote at MacWorld San Francisco, during his he will surely announce iLife ’07, part of which will be iWeb 2. It was on 13th January 2006 that I first got my hands on iWeb and began this weblog. A long, long year indeed. A lot has happened in the iWeb community since then, most of which has been geared towards expanding the scope of iWeb beyond what Apple provided. I’ve always been more interested in the actual usability aspect of the software rather than the more esoteric demands of so many users who want iWeb to do what they were previously able to do with other web creation tools. A great deal of wonderful work has been done in this respect, and I salute everyone who has come up with workarounds for incorporating this that and the other into iWeb pages. But my predilection fundamentally remains with increasing the level of customisation which is available to users, and it is this area which I hope will be the focus for improvements which are to come with iWeb 2. It’s a bit late in the day to prepare a wish list, perhaps, but that’s just what I’m going to do now. I’ve already submitted much of this in feedback to Apple. It will be interesting to see how much of it iWeb 2 delivers.
  1. 1.  User-defined Templates
  2. We all know the wonderful work which Suzanne Boben is doing with her templates for iWeb. As someone who was there at the start digging away in line after line of XML code, I’m fully aware of the complexity of what’s involved in doing what Suzanne does. No doubt she has streamlined the process to a certain extent at this stage (and I see in recent entries on her blog that she’s now roped in her nephews to help with the donkey work), but let nobody underestimate the tedious nature of all this.
  3. We need to be freed from this. Keynote has long allowed users to create their own templates, and Pages also does this. While these two apps are part of iWork rather than iLife, it is obvious that iWeb comes from the same stable. Perhaps it’s simplistic to expect iWeb to incorporate this just because of its kinship with Keynote and Pages, but nonetheless this is my primary wish for iWeb 2.
  4. 2.  Improved management of multiple sites
  5. The small number of upgrades which Apple deigned to release during the past year gave us a modicum of better control over multiple sites, but there is still much more room for improvement. At the very least we need to be freed from the limitation of being unable to rename all those Domain files which we have scattered around in so many different folders, but it would be so much better if we could just be more selective in what we choose to publish. Upgrades during the year have made some effort to address this, but they haven’t proved to be fully effective, while the new freedom of being able to launch Domains by double-clicking no matter where they’re stored is not as elegant as it might be, and becomes confusing because of iWeb’s remembering the last-used Domain when it’s launched from the Dock.
  6. 3.  Improved performance when publishing to .Mac
  7. Quite frankly, one thing which the past year has highlighted is the general inadequacy of .Mac. This has been evident in both directions, with desperately slow progress when publishing and equally slow page-load times from the server. Only yesterday I spotted a rumour about much-increased storage limits for .Mac members being in the offing (from the present maximum of 4 GB to a remarkable 30 GB if the rumour is to be believed), and perhaps this suggests that this increased storage will be needed to take advantage of planned service improvements. Let’s hope so. As things stand, .Mac is a very weak link in the iWeb chain.
  8. 4.  More on-page widgets
  9. Comments and Search were added during the year, but their implementation was less than perfect, to say the least. However, the manner in which they were incorporated still gives me hope that they can yet prove a prelude to much expanded functionality within iWeb. When you think about it, we began with built-in building blocks for Email and Slideshow which do all sort of neat things under the hood, and Comments and Search expanded this. I’ve already speculated about this sort of thing, and I still have high hopes that iWeb 2 will bring with it some form of Widget Library which will make iWeb pages much more dynamic.
Sunday 7 January 2007
12:27 p.m.