Apple has already had its greatest loss this month with the death of Steve Jobs. However, the death of iWeb while not of the same magnitude is also a big blow particularly for students and teachers.
This is my spin, if you agree or disagree please comment.
1. I have used iWeb for years with many groups of students, who have used it to create websites on sustainability, farming, democracy and various Challenge Based Learning projects.
See http://ictedservices.typepad.com/elearning/challenge-based-learning/ http://www.ictedservices.info/ http://www.ictedservices.com/iWeb_PD_2.0.html
2. iWeb and MobileMe meant that anyone could create a good looking website easily and then easily have it hosted. This meant that teachers and students without access to any online services at their school could still create and host websites. O.K. so this hosting facility is going with the transition to iCloud, but there are plenty of other places where you can easily host a website or three!
3. Enter Lion and iLife is trimmed of iDVD and iWeb, which are both no longer supported. iWeb is no longer packaged with new Macs and not available at the App Store. Read up on the web and find that if you have an iLife '11 disk you can install it. Hey, great!. So I do this and find that you need to re install iPhoto. No problem doing that from the App Store and we are back in business or are we?Yes, you can seemingly still create an iWeb website in Lion. But what if you want to create another iWeb website at the same user account? Now you used to be able to do this by going to where the domain file was stored, user/library/application support/iweb and grab that file and put it somewhere else or rename it etc. When you re-launched iWeb, a new domain file was created and you could create another iWeb website. So what now? Well firstly, the user library folder is hidden. You can get to it in Finder > Go > Go to Folder then ~/Library. O.K. so you can find the domain file, rename or move it [ i.e. do the old trick above] as before, but it no longer works. Create as many re-named domain files as you like, but they will all open up with the content of just one of the iWeb sites! So basically it's one iWeb website per user. Now you can create one website in iWeb, publish it to a folder, delete your site from iWeb then create a new one, but what if you wanted to edit the first one?
4. Now I am teaching ICT to 160 grade 3 & 4 students who are making individual websites about Simple Machines. I also teach 140 grade 5 & 6 students who are making individual websites about the technology of building a Billy Cart. They are just having a ball! Some of these completed websites will be hosted on the School Intranet, all will go home on disk or USB drive. Now the school is running Snow Leopard on its computers, so we have no problems with such projects, well, not until next time when we have upgraded our computers.
5. Is there volume licensing for RapidWeaver or similar in schools? Students and teachers need something simple to quickly make websites in!!
If you have an opinion on this please comment.
[As with any software recommendations in my blog and websites, what I write about, is my opinion only and I take no responsibility for anything going wrong with your computer, server, network etc.. Please read the conditions and product disclosures and EULA for each application. Always exercise care and caution!]
