Appleness and My Website
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 15th January, 2006 @ 23:42
So I find myself lusting after a MacBook Pro and hatching plans to sell my year old 12" PowerBook, and maybe even the PowerMac G5 if it made a good desktop replacement.
But I'm going to be patient, they don't ship for a month, and I want to read some reviews of them first. First generation Apple products can sometimes be a little flakey, and they've not mentioned battery life at all and they have always done so in the past, even if their estimates were a little optimistic of real life experience and only really applicable to the first few months. My year old battery now lasts about 1h30m at best.
Plus there's been rumours that the only reason the rest of the product line hasn't been converted yet is because of a shortage of Core Duo processors and that there'll be a more revolutionary upgrade coming in a few months. So I really should wait for that. I'm using the G5 loads more these days, so the laptop really isn't as important to me as it was.
The lovely James decided to go Mac recently, and finally purchased his brand new Mini this week, I ordered it Thursday lunchtime, it arrived Friday. The Apple Store is sooo much faster when they have stuff in stock waiting in the UK!
What I wasn't expecting to find in the box this soon was a copy of iLife '06. I'd assumed we'd have to send off for it after we'd received the Mini. But sure enough, there it was!
iPhoto gets more slick and more useful with each release, which is great. The calendars look fantastic. I've never ordered prints of my digital photography, preferring to get it online or on DVDs. The alternatives the latest version of iPhoto makes available make getting stuff printed much more appealing to me. Photocasting is pretty useless to me as I don't have a .Mac account and don't plan to get one. Maybe if I can stick my own domain name on it I'd be tempted.
A quick launch of iMovie let me briefly play with the animation thingies, which are kind of cool. Though as I've bought Final Cut Express, I'm not likely to use this particular app too much.
iDVD has a much more usable layout in my opinion, and widescreen menus are a great addition, especially for the UK (and I assume most of Europe) where we've had widescreen TVs as the norm for years now!
GarageBand's podcast studio is pretty cool, and the integration of all the apps, highlighted most by the sixth member of the suite, really shows here. The sound effects and jingles are very good. If I made podcasts I'm sure I'd find it all very useful. But as I demonstrate with my currently intermittent blogging, I've not really got anything to talk about.
On to iWeb... I have to say, this is a really cool app! It takes literally a few minutes to put a nice looking site together. My main reservation is that it'll create hundreds of sites that look identical. But from recent blog reads, WordPress seems to do that already. Anyway, that's besides the point. This program makes putting a page together incredibly easy, integrating your iLife data in an easy drag and drop fashion. And you can Publish to a Folder as well as .Mac. Not quite so swish, no AJAX photo galleries, and something weird happened to the character encoding when I uploaded it.
Here's what my site my look like if I'd built it in iWeb. It's not too bad for 5 minutes of work (then 10 mins of replacing the weird encoding, you can still see it if you drill down to the blog entry).
That, along with some other sites I've looked at lately (along with some reliablity issues I've had which are down to Apache's interaction with Zope, and not a problem with Plone), make me want to abandon Plone. Customising the visuals just isn't that easy or flexible. So I'm tempted to rebuild from scratch and import everything over, make it look a little nicer and actually have a working comments system.
Watch this space...
