iWeb: Deceptively Simple WYSIWYG Website Editor
Macworld kicked off today in San Francisco with Apple CEO Steve Jobs announcing the company’s newest hardware and software products. As expected, there were Intel notebooks, an Intel iMac, and a revamped iPhoto and Garageband. Also expected, but still shrouded in mystery until 10AM today, was the newest addition to the iLife suite, iWeb.
We speculated last week that iWeb was going to be a publishing tool for content created within the iLife suite. Turns out that it’s actually a fairly robust personal WYSIWYG web editor. Jobs used iWeb’s Apple-designed, pre-fab templates to build a website in just two minutes during his keynote address. He populated his pages with photos from his iPhoto library, a podcast he created in the new Podcast Studio inside of Garageband, and a movie he dragged and dropped from iMovie. Pretty impressive stuff — there’s also a blog tool complete with an RSS feed generator.
I went to the Apple booth and took a full tour of iWeb. I’ll fill you in on all of the details in my full review coming later this week, but one stand-out feature is the Ajax-powered slide show that iWeb pumps out.
Upon seeing this, I asked Marc, the Apple employee conducting my iWeb tour, if it was safe to say that Apple has now made the leap to Web 2.0. He glanced around nervously and said, “I don’t know… is it safe to say anything?”
I’ll be putting up some photos in just a bit. Until then, check out the full coverage on Wired News and the Cult of Mac blog.
