Quick Review of Apple’s New iWeb ‘08
Note: this isn’t an actual review, it’s a rant about how iWeb ‘08 fucking sucks. This tweet is a summary of the following text.
I recently upgraded from iWeb ‘06 to iWeb ‘08. As some may know, I publish my podcast, eastern threat, with iWeb. Everything worked fine until the upgrade. Exporting was a little slow (eastern threat doesn’t use .Mac as the archive is several gigabytes in size already), the directory structure sucked, but I didn’t really mind. It worked.
Enter iWeb ‘08. Superficially, the app is still the same. But when I tried exporting eastern threat, it became an infuriating piece of shit that made me feel so angry that words can’t really convey it here. Here are a few of the things that really pissed me off:
A huge fucking cache. I export the podcast to an external hard drive because the iBook’s drive doesn’t have enough space for exporting it. iWeb ‘06 had the library on the iBook’s disk somewhere, and just used that to export it to the external disk. Now, iWeb ‘08 first creates a cache of what is to be exported on the iBook’s internal disk, and then exports the podcast to the external disk. As I said earlier, there isn’t enough disk space to hold two copies of eastern threat on the internal disk, so you can see why this would be a problem.
.Mac. iWeb still fucking bugs me about using .Mac for publishing the podcast instead of what I use now. Message to Apple: NO THANKS, YOU DO NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH DISK SPACE, OKAY? NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP.
The MP3s are no longer MP3s. iWeb ‘08 creates QuickTime containers (.mov) of the MP3s I drop into iWeb. Now why the fuck would it do that? There are people who actually listen to this podcast who don’t have Macs, or don’t even have QuickTime, or don’t even run Mac OS X or Windows! iWeb ‘06 left the MP3s alone, and people were happy. Except for Apple, apparently.
The directory structure and file names have been changed throughout the podcast. This means that the old URL for the RSS feed (or any other links, for that matter) won’t work anymore. Fucking fantastic.
Would it have been so hard for Apple to make some “keep things as they were and don’t fuck everything up with some ridiculously fucking stupid shit” option?
There’s at least one good thing that’s come out of this whole fucking debacle: I definitely have to code a new site for eastern threat now.
