Years ago, when setting out to make Toy Story 2, the geniuses at a Pixar made a very deliberate decision, “We’re not going to make two kinds of movies, great and not-so-great, we’ll only make great movies.” This is, of course, in contrast with Disney, which was (and still is) releasing admittedly not-so-great sequels direct to video/DVD.
Apple has yet to make that same decision. Even though pretty much all of Apple’s hardware (ignoring some minor failures like the Cube and the hockey-puck mouse) is top-notch, their software comes in two distinct sets, excellent and crappy.
On the excellent side, we have OS X, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie (people might object to the last two on that list, but I’ll stand by them, they are easier to use and produce better output than their direct competition, if you want more power, you can always use Aperture and Final Cut Pro).
On the crappy side, we have iWeb, which I have just finished moving away from for blogging. I’m on WordPress now, and the level of sophistication and easy of use is like night and day. WordPress is so slick that it actually feels like an Apple product, a good one.
I wanted to like iWeb, I really did. I was specifically interested in the tight integration with iPhoto and iMovie, both of which I use. But the little things, like the sheer difficulty in creating a post: delete the weird snowboarder graphic, select and delete all of the garbage text, actually write stuff, un-bold the entire text (why? why is everything bold?), delete the “forward” and “back” links, select everything and move it up to the space where the snowboarder graphic was.
And there were big things too, I tried to turn on blog comments, and at least one person commented, but it inexplicably stopped working. I published an RSS feed, but it didn’t preserve my line endings, so all of my RSS posts were one giant paragraph. Sorry, I need my paragraph breaks. Trackbacks seemed impossible.
I never figured out how to see, on .MAC, if anyone was actually reading the blog, so I used an automator plug in to add google analytics to each page after I published it. It was a clumsy hack, but it confirmed my suspicion: most of my readership comes from people in Houston, who can’t quite spell “chron.com” and stumble around for a while looking for their local news.
In the meantime, I combined my three separate blogs into one. I thought, at the outset, that my three major interests, software, photography, and writing, were strong enough to each warrant their own blog. I was wrong. It turns out that I am more of a “workblogger” than “photoblogger”, and it’s hard to be a “writerblogger” especially since what I write is always such drivel. So, I’m just going to throw them all into the same pile and use the cool tagging features of wordpress to distinguish between them for anyone who cares.
It has been rumored that there’s a new version of the iLife suite in the works. If there is, I suspect that Apple will move to a more server-side approach to their blogging solution than iWeb’s current “create content on the client and send that to a dumb server as HTML”. Maybe it will wind up looking like WordPress.
