HTML Snippets let you place objects on your site pages that are actually served by other sites.

 

iWEB '08 - WEBSITE IN A BOX

We need to take a little reality check before getting into an evaluation of iWeb ’08, the second version of Apple’s WYSIWYG-only website design and management tool. It’s not intended for code jockeys, freelance Web developers, porn-site moguls, or anyone else who makes their bacon making websites. Like the other iLife apps, iWeb is intended to be the quickest, easiest way to organize and share the artifacts of your digital life - with output that you’re proud to share.

 

That said, iWeb ’08 has some righteous new features, like HTML code snippets, Google Maps, and of course some exclusive perks for .Mac subscribers. For nonsubscribers, the old all-or-nothing publish-to-a-folder system is back, and the workaround for the lack of custom domain-name support is downright shameful (see “At Least Say My (Domain) Name...”).

 

New Web Widgets. iWeb ’08 looks pretty much the same as its predecessor, with most of the new magic hiding behind the Web Widgets icon in the toolbar that accesses HTML Snippets, Google AdSense Ads, Google Maps, and any Web Galleries you’ve published to your .Mac account. Adding an HTML snippet is a breeze: Select HTML Snippet from the Web Widget pop-up, and either type the code in the pop-up window or paste in code provided at sites like YouTube to embed others’ content into your iWeb page (please heed the iWeb manual, which notes that piping in too much content will slow down your page, MySpace style). The toughest part was selecting and copying the embed link from YouTube, which shows you how not-tough this is.

 

iWeb’s own movie-controlling mojo is a little better than before - you can now specify a movie to play automatically or loop, and hide the controller, but that’s it. If you’re crafty, you can use an HTML snippet to embed your own QuickTime movies with custom parameters, like <palindrome=true>, to make your movie loop forward and backward. Of the other Web Widgets, Google Maps are a hoot, and if you’re looking to make some beer money from your blog, iWeb will help you set up a Google AdSense account and drop in the tags.

 

iWeb ’08 also adds a little Web 2.0 juju to your photo pages: You can now allow visitors to append their comments with attachments of up to 5MB, but only if you publish to .Mac. We were initially jazzed about iWeb ’08’s preview display of iPhoto Web Galleries, but the supercool effect of “skimming” through the gallery images by rolling the cursor back and forth across the preview box only goes so far. We were disappointed that none of the Graphic or Metrics Inspector adjustments (Rotate, Resize, Stroke, Shadow, and so on) affects the preview.

 

All of iWeb ’08’s themes (like the cool new Comic Book) now include a Blank template to design as you see fit. On the other end of the DIY spectrum, you can also switch themes on command to change your site from stuffy to fluffy, for example. The only catch with swapping themes is that if you strayed much from the original theme’s design, the new theme probably won’t fit perfectly, and you’ll need to massage it into the template.

 

At Least Say My (Domain) Name... Apple’s claim that iWeb ’08 supports custom domain names is, frankly, a load of www.BS.com. In this case, “support” means that you can publish to www.yoursite.com only after you transfer stewardship of your domain to Apple, which mirrors your .Mac site to www.yoursite.com. And yes, a .Mac subscription is required.

 

When One Site Just Isn’t Enough. iWeb ’08 limits you to publish just one website to one server. But if you need to go over that limit, try Clarkwood Software’s Multisite for iWeb 2.0 ($19.95, www.clarkwood.com/multisite), which lets you create, manage, and publish more than iWeb ’08 site. You can also decide which of your multiple sites you want to publish at any given time, instead of publishing them all at once. And even if you’re not a .Mac subscriber, Multisite for iWeb’s selective publishing is worth your $20.

 

The Bottom Line. We probably don’t need to tell you that if you need professional-level Web tools, you should look elsewhere. However, if you want an easy way to put great-looking websites on your .Mac space, iWeb ’08 is push-button easy, both for designing and uploading. If you’re not willing to spend $99 a year to subscribe to .Mac, your pages will still look great, but using iWeb ’08 will become a lot less appealing.

 

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $79 as part of iLife ’08; free with a new Mac

REQUIREMENTS: G4, G5, or Intel Mac; Mac OS 10.4.9 or later; 512MB RAM (1GB recommended); 3GB free disk space; Internet and Web server access

More cool .Mac integration, such as Web Gallery previews and user-upload-friendly photo albums. Blank page templates and swappable themes.

.Mac subscription required for the best stuff. Custom domain-name support is weak, even with .Mac.

 

 

More...

 

---

The new .Mac replaces static photo galleries with interactive pages that allow visitors to upload their own photos and choose from several viewing options. We wish we got the option to review images submitted by others before they’re posted.

 

.MAC - WHERE YOUR MAC AND .COM MEET

With the rise of free Web 2.0 services such as YouTube and Flickr, berating .Mac for its $99-a-year price tag and storage caps became an official pastime. Apple’s update to the service takes some of the sting out of those barbs while providing users with one-click access to Web 2.0 publishing.

 

More Bang For Your 99 Bucks. Existing .Mac members will first notice the more generous storage and bandwidth limits. Apple bumped up storage space from 1GB to 10GB, divided between email and iDisk. Bandwidth increased to 100GB a month, enough to share even DVD-quality video from iMovie. Email accounts benefit from better spam filtering and increased attachment sizes, and support for custom domains allows any site published to .Mac the prestige of having its own domain name (well, sort of).

 

Other upgrades are tied to feature enhancements in iLife ’08. Galleries published from iPhoto ’08 create breathtaking pages rich in Web 2.0 options, including an iTunes-like carousel view. Apple says the goal was to make the Web browser experience application-like, and it certainly is. The upgrades also add a layer of interactivity. Visitors can upload their own photos to published galleries, and their contributions can be automatically downloaded into the original iPhoto library. Similarly, you can share movies created in iMovie ’08 online with a click of a button.

 

These updates are all well and good. The new limits are generous, but their very existence compares poorly to services that offer unlimited storage. Of course, .Mac’s integration with iLife ’08 apps makes it a different animal than browser-based services, but it will always be compared to them. Given the number of iLife features that require .Mac, we also wonder how long it will be feasible for the service to be sold as an option, rather than bundled with the purchase of a new Mac or iLife ’08.

 

The Bottom Line. Much-needed upgrades to storage space and bandwidth make .Mac competitive in the Web 2.0 world, and the exclusive features that the service unlocks within iLife ’08 almost justify the annual subscription fee.

 

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.mac.com

PRICE: $99 per year

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later (10.4.10 recommended); some features require 10.4 and iLife ‘08

Increased storage and bandwidth. Support for publishing websites to custom domain names (i.e., yourname.com). Improved spam filtering.

Even increased storage and bandwidth limits stand out among unlimited competitors.

 

 

More...

 

---

Path animation let us create a slide in which the alien in his flying saucer moves along the curved path in red. (Also, check out the results of Keynote’s Instant Alpha feature: We knocked out a solid-blue background from behind the solar-system clip art.)

 

KEYNOTE '08 - YOU RUN THE SLIDESHOW

Presentations are ubiquitous, from the classroom to the boardroom. Like it or not, you may at some point in your life be judged on the quality of your slideshow presentations. So what will you use to persuade and inform: A PowerPoint preso that shouts, “Stodgy!” or a slick Keynote show that makes your audience sit up and take notice? With the latest update of Keynote, part of iWork ’08, you can truly dazzle any audience.

 

Even Cooler Visuals - and Audio Too. Keynote ’08 adds a few ultracool special-effects capabilities, one of which is A to B animations. This lets allows you to animate objects on slide-along motion paths (a feature that Microsoft’s PowerPoint 2004 can’t touch). These paths can be straight lines or Bézier curves, and you can control both the length of the movement and the way the object accelerates along the path. The result is object movement with a pleasing, organic feel. Besides moving objects, you can also control their opacity, rotation, and size.

 

The 10 new Smart Builds are a huge time-saver, letting you place multiple images on a single slide, then adding an animation effect for their display during the presentation. In the previous version of Keynote, you would have had to do a separate build for each image. When you create a Smart Build in Keynote ’08, an image placeholder and a photo window appear on your slide. You drag iPhoto images from the Media Browser into the photo window, loading them into the Smart Build. When you play the presentation, the images animate one by one onto the slide. Effects include thumbing through a stack of photos or having the images mounted on a rotating turntable.

 

Along with nine attractive new themes, Keynote ’08 brings fresh eye candy, including new animated text effects such as Comet and Sparkle, which burn text onto the screen, and new transitions such as Confetti, which explodes the slide into particles that then coalesce into the next slide.

 

Every version of Keynote has offered improved image editing, and the new feature in this area for ’08 is Instant Alpha. For images with a fairly uniform background, Instant Alpha lets you select the background color, and Keynote ’08 knocks out the background, leaving only the foreground image. This feature won’t replace Photoshop or another image editor for advanced image-masking needs, but for the average user, Instant Alpha is not only a time-saver, but it also means you don’t need to need to launch another app.

 

Also in the time-saving category, Keynote ’08 now shares the new Format Bar under the toolbar with Pages and Numbers, which makes changing text and image properties much faster than fumbling through multiple panes of the Inspector and the Fonts window.

 

We’ve been waiting for Apple to add a voiceover feature - and it has. This allows you to create slideshows that can be played on demand, without your presence. We wish the audio handling were a bit more flexible, however. If you flub a line in the middle of recording slide 8 of a 20-slide presentation, you can’t rerecord the voiceover for just that slide after you’re all done. You can start over from slide 8, but that’s a small consolation, especially if you’re pressed for time. And Keynote ‘08 doesn’t let you add background music to a subset of slides, nor can you automatically fade out a sound that’s playing when you advance to the next slide.

 

We also stumbled on an annoying hiccup. If you have more than 50 Keynote themes loaded, the Themes menu in the Keynote ’08 toolbar can’t display them all. Instead, only the last 50 themes appear, preventing you from switching to themes that would have appeared earlier in the list. This includes Apple’s themes (because Keynote puts them in the menu before third-party themes).

 

The Bottom Line. Keynote ’08 is an elegant, powerful tool for creating slideshows and multimedia presentations. Improved animations, transitions, and effects help you get your message across, and the app’s excellent text handling and beautifully designed themes make it easy to put on an eye-popping show. Keynote ’08 beat PowerPoint 2008 for the Mac (due out next year) to market - and we predict it’s going to give Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation software a major run for its money.

 

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $79 as part of iWork ’08

REQUIREMENTS: 500MHz or faster G4, G5, or Intel Mac; Mac OS 10.4.10 or later; 1GB free disk space; 512MB RAM; 32MB video RAM

Easy animation along a path. Smart Builds deliver flashy effects painlessly. Instant background removal saves tons of time.

Audio handling not as smooth as we’d like. Can’t display more than 50 themes.

 

 

More...

 

---

Numbers’ most welcome improvement over other spreadsheets is its ability to include multiple elements - including different-sized tables - on the same page.

 

NUMBERS '08 - NUMBERS ALMOST ADDS UP

In many ways, Apple’s consumer software is all about looking good while accomplishing just enough to get by. Numbers - the new spreadsheet component of iWork ’08 - is no exception. The app’s most fundamental improvement over competing spreadsheets is that a page, or sheet, is a container for multiple elements and not simply an array of rows and columns.

 

Very Different Design. Lending a vein of creativity to something as potentially dry as a spreadsheet program, each Numbers sheet can include any or all types of Numbers elements, including charts, text boxes, shapes, sticky-note comments, images, movies, links to sound files, and tables, all of which can be in multiple sizes and configurations.

 

Rows and columns are the bread and butter of spreadsheets, and those in Numbers ’08 are appropriately toasty and tasty. A set of 10 basic table styles are provided, but elements such as headers, background colors, borders, and the like can be easily modified using either the Table tab in the Inspector palette or the appropriate icons in the Format Bar of the main interface. Once modified, a custom table style can be saved into the left-hand Styles pane.

 

Working in tables is straightforward; most familiar navigation and selection conventions apply, although you can’t assign the Return key to move the selection right or left. To accomplish simple math such as sums, averages, and counts, you select a range of data, then drag the result into your target cell from a list below the Styles pane. You can achieve more complex results by building English-language formulas based on the text in a table’s row and column headers.

 

You can also modify a cell’s contents using a slider or up-arrow/down-arrow stepper, as well as set the maximum and minimum values allowed. (These controls, however, can’t be used to modify dates.) Checkboxes and pop-up menus can also be used for data entry, but once you enter items in a pop-up menu’s list, their order can’t be changed. Also, if you’ve ever used Excel’s time-saving Paste Special > Transpose command to switch vertical tables to horizontal ones, don’t go searching for it in Numbers ’08 - it’s not there. Another disappointment: Conditional Formatting is limited to text and cell-fill color.

 

Spreadsheet geeks will be happy to learn that Numbers includes 168 special-purpose Functions (Excel, by comparison, includes 270). We’re generally happy with the selection; all of the familiar financial functions are there, although many statistical functions are missing. And don’t go looking for Excel-style macro functions - Numbers ’08 doesn’t support them. (Nor does it support password protection of cells, tables, or files.)

 

Perhaps by now you’ve seen a pattern here? Charting skills, for example, summarize Numbers ’08 in a nutshell: It’s a snap to produce absolutely gorgeous charts, but your control over them is somewhat limited. You can neither move a chart’s title (delete it and use a Text Box instead), nor can you change the color of a single bar or column. You can change a chart’s color set, but the selection of color sets is limited, and you can’t create your own custom sets. And you can’t create and save custom chart styles.

 

The ability to import data from other spreadsheets - Microsoft Excel, for example - can best be described as “generally acceptable.” In our tests, Numbers ’08 imported and exported most simple files without a hitch. More complex, multisheet Excel workbooks occasionally had broken cross-worksheet links, and imported charts in general were often a mess. That said, Numbers ’08 will open both your bank’s OFX (Open Financial Exchange) documents and files in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows’ OpenXML format.

 

Finally, Numbers brilliantly solves all your spreadsheet-printing headaches. Simply select File > Show Print View, then drag your various tables, charts, images and the like from page to page. Wherever you put them, that’s exactly where they’ll appear on the printed copy.

 

The Bottom Line. Numbers is a competent app that can handle most personal and small-business spreadsheet needs with style and elegance. It won’t, however, lure hard-nosed financial types and serious number-crunchers away from Excel.

 

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $79 as part of iWork ’08

REQUIREMENTS: 500MHz or faster G4, G5, or Intel Mac; Mac OS 10.4.10 or later; 1GB free disk space; 512MB RAM; 32MB video RAM

Tables can be of multiple sizes on the same sheet. Graphics are gorgeous. Printing’s a breeze. Sliders and steppers make “what if?” scenarios a snap. Universal binary.

A host of minor-but-annoying customization and interface limitations. No password protection. Doesn’t support Excel macros. Somewhat pokey performance.

 

 

More...

 

---

Word Processing mode emphasizes tools needed for creating and editing text.

 

PAGES '08 - THIS APP'S ALL WRITE

Most modern word-processing apps share the same fundamental challenge: serving their traditional role as writing tools while also satisfying demand for page-layout capabilities. Pages ’08 hurdles this bar with more aplomb than either its predecessor or Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac - and it looks good doing it.

 

The Magic of Modes. The most fundamental change is the creation of distinct modes for word processing and page layout. When you open a blank document from the word-processing templates, you’ll enter Word Processing mode. New pages appear as your text overflows the current page, and you won’t be bothered with text boxes or other layout elements. Likewise, open a document from the page-layout templates to enter Page Layout mode.

 

Complementing both modes is a contextual formatting bar that changes depending on your current task. When you’re writing, the Format Bar displays a font menu and buttons for styling text (a feature that was sorely missed in Pages 2, part of iWork ’06). When you’re positioning objects on a page, the Format Bar shows controls for fill color, shadow, and opacity.

 

Other changes improve the software’s standing against Microsoft Word. The ability to track changes makes Pages ’08 a more viable replacement for Word, as does improved compatibility with Word documents. We imported and exported documents between the two applications for a week with no problems.

 

Pages ’08 also adds several helpful menu items for composing and sharing documents. The Writing Tools menu (Edit > Writing Tools) allows you to quickly look up highlighted words in Wikipedia, Google, or the Dictionary app. And documents are more easily exported to PDF or iWeb ’08 through additions to the File menu.

 

Style-wise, the most obvious additions to Pages ’08 are 80 new document templates, all of which maintain the design standard set by the original templates in previous versions. Some of the greatest expansions are in the Resume and Poster template categories, and there’s also a new category of business card templates. After using the templates in Pages, the templates in Office 2004 seem painfully amateurish.

 

Our complaints with Pages ’08 are minor and focus mostly on the software’s function as a word processor. Getting a word count - essential information for anyone who writes for print - requires the user to navigate three menu items deep (Edit > Writing Tools > Show Statistics). The new word-processing mode makes writing easier, but we long to see more innovative features, such as a full-screen editing mode. And while page layout is much improved in this revision, adjusting layout elements with the Inspector can be hit or miss for those who are new to it.

 

The Bottom Line. Pages ’08 leaps ahead of its predecessor in consistency and ease of use, and its greater compatibility with Microsoft Word makes it a compelling, cost-effective choice for home and small-business users.

 

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $79 as part of iWork ’08

REQUIREMENTS: 500MHz or faster G4, G5, or Intel Mac; Mac OS 10.4.10 or later; 1GB free disk space; 512MB RAM; 32MB video RAM

Distinct modes for page layout and word processing offer greater ease of use. Contextual Format Bar keeps essentials at your fingertips. Improved compatibility with Microsoft Word.

Some document stats are hard to find. No full-screen editing mode for word processing. Adjusting layout elements with Inspector takes some getting used to.