I watched Steve Job’s keynote speech at Macworld. I always enjoy these presentations because Steve is simply one of the best presenters on earth. He talked about the amazing iPod sales, introduced the new Intel Macs, and showed off several of the new iLife applications that make photography, movie-editting, podcasting, and web building very simple.
(As I type, Claire and Kelly are giggling at the their podcast created in the new version of Garageband. They are using voice effects that make them sound like chipmunks and Will Farrell.)
In addition to iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, and iTunes, I was really impressed with a new member of the iLife suite called iWeb. It makes web page building easy. Including photos, movies, graphics, and text using fun templates can be done so quickly and easily, I couldn’t believe it.
So I bought iLife for $99. I can install it on up to five family Macs. There is nothing like this suite of software in the Windows world. Apple is so far ahead with integration between consumer-friendly applications, I don’t think Microsoft can ever catch up.
Here are two simple pages I created in a few minutes and then published to our home web server. I was happy to discover I did not have to pay for a .Mac account to publish these pages.
Jeb –
One problem I’ve noticed with iWeb pages is that they are VERY slow to load because of some weird way the program manipulates images. FYI, Apple released an update this week that is supposed to help that. But on Apple’s forums, some people were running into problems after installing the update.
Just now I tried to open your pages and got a server error. I don’t know if that’s iWeb or something else.
The links above happen to be to our home Mac which shuts itself down between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. I’ll move them to the mac5 server.
Dad, That is very cool! How are you enjoying iLife now?
p.s. That’s a hilarious story about Stout, I never heard that !! Glad he was saved. What a fearless dog Stout is.
Steve Jobs and the Macintosh world sort of remove themselves from the general population. It’s only people like you who know how wonderful they are. Too bad they can’t get the word out to the other folks who don’t know better.
I’ve been trying to spread the Mac word for many years: See: My Mother, The Mac.
Those pages are suprisingly well done. They are very attractive and proffesional looking. Now if only Adobe would merge some Flash elements into iWeb…I like the little ‘made on a mac’ button at the bottom.