Apple's Web effort perfect for some

Shiny new computers always catch the eye, but it's the software they run that captures the mind. Look at the new iMac and you realize it's mostly the same hardware as its predecessor (which is still for sale) except that an Intel Core Duo processor powers the software.

I don't mean to disparage the work of the engineers who've made the switch from PowerPC to Intel possible, but for most everyone who buys an iMac now (or the MacBook Pro laptop when it starts shipping in February) the experience is the same, but faster. Mac OS X and its applications just run.

OK, there are a few exceptions. Older applications that run under the Classic (Mac OS 9) environment will never run on an Intel Mac, and the Final Cut Suite won't operate until a universal binary version is available for $50 in March. But other programs, even if they're not yet universal, will run just fine — albeit slower — on the new machines.

Software matters, because even if you're using a gadget such as an iPod, cellphone or TiVo, you're interacting with its software.

At his Macworld Expo keynote address early this month, Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs focused most of his time on the improvements in iLife '06 (which are all universal applications).

iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie HD, and GarageBand all received significant updates, but I want to focus on the newcomer to the bunch, iWeb.

As you can guess, iWeb is a program for building Web sites.

Apple's previous solution to getting content on the Web involved exporting material from a program such as iMovie HD or iPhoto to a .Mac HomePage. While that's a perfectly acceptable route, you couldn't easily change content on a Web page once you'd posted it; if you wanted to add some more pictures to a photo page, you needed to re-create the page in iPhoto, for example.

With iWeb, you can create a page, edit its contents later, and then repost the updated page. Apple includes several templates to build upon, wrapped in an interface that's as simple to use as Pages (the word processor/desktop publishing software included in iWork '06).

That sounds simple, but it's a remarkably difficult thing to accomplish; Web design applications are either overly simple or way too complex for mortals who have no interest in becoming code monkeys. Apple, once again, applies its expertise at stripping away nonessential features to home in on what a program should be.

But that's not the best part of iWeb. It's the conduit for taking all sorts of other iLife-created material to the Web, using the interaction that Apple has built across the iLife suite. I've created a Web site that shows off some of these capabilities at web.mac.com/jeffc/iWeb/.

I created the main page, an About Me page, and a couple of photo pages directly in iWeb. Then I built a one-minute movie in iMovie HD that incorporates video clips, a still photo, and iMovie HD's new themes. Taking advantage of GarageBand's new capability to create video podcasts, I exported (which Apple refers to as "sharing") the iMovie project directly into GarageBand and built a soundtrack. When I was satisfied with the result, I shared the movie to iWeb as a podcast, which formatted the video into a format that would also play on a video-capable iPod.

In iWeb, I chose a travel template for the podcast page, edited the text on the page, and clicked the Publish button to post the files to my .Mac site. Without any extra work on my part, the podcast is set up so that people can subscribe to it using iTunes or an RSS reader application and have the latest podcast entry automatically downloaded to their computers.

This example was building a movie, but you can also create audio-only podcasts in GarageBand, or maintain a text blog from within iWeb itself.

If that's the extent of your self-publishing aspirations on the Web, iWeb is a great solution. However, experienced Netizens may find iWeb lacking in some key areas.

Especially if you've done any amount of Web design in the past, iWeb can be frustrating at first. One of the first things I did after launching the program was to choose a theme for a page, but I quickly discovered that I couldn't apply a new theme to that page, a commonplace action in iDVD and Keynote (the presentation software that's part of iWork).

You're also limited in how you can customize a page. iWeb is perfect for those who want ready-made design, but don't expect to stray far from Apple's themes.

Unlike some Web creation programs (I'm looking at you, FrontPage), the underlying code generated by iWeb is pretty good. Not ideal, but it could have been so much worse. However, I was surprised to find very little image compression being applied; photos are positively huge compared with most images on the Web, with the photo on my main sample page weighing in at 400 kilobytes.

The blame lies in the choice of using PNG-formatted files to preserve transparency effects, which keeps the quality high at the expense of file sizes; but, as an Apple executive told me during a briefing during Macworld Expo, "It's a broadband world."

Last, iWeb ultimately doesn't compare to even slightly more sophisticated services such as photo-sharing site Flickr (www.flickr.com) or blogging service TypePad (www.typepad.com), both of which I use. There's no capacity for readers to leave comments or track incoming traffic, removing the community interaction that is the heart of successful blogging.

You also need a .Mac account ($100 yearly) to make iWeb work as smoothly as intended, though you can also export your site to a local directory that you can upload to your own Web server or Web hosting service.

However, notice that we've quickly strayed from an easy-to-use, code-free approach into moderately geeky Web developer territory. That's the danger in making Web publishing software. The people using iWeb likely just want to publish photos and movies, and get started with blogging and podcasting without a lot of hassle. And that's exactly what iWeb delivers.

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.