found_drama

When we left off, we had basically concluded that Microsoft Word was out of the running. Content creation was relatively easy but the output was ugly (technically-speaking) and the publication problem itself was totally unsolved. So (I said to myself) what about [tag]iWeb[/tag]?

The disclaimer (of course) is that (1) I’m admittedly biased toward the Mac and (2) we stated pretty much at the outset that Mac-based solutions were fair game. Anyway, moving on…

To listen to the marketing hype, iWeb sounds like the way to go. Super simple and all that. If it’s anything like iTunes or iPhoto then we are in great shape. So let’s give it a trial run.

The first warning here is that it prompted me with the familiar Keychain Access dialog, looking for permission to access my .Mac account. Except that I let my .Mac account lapse … 3 years ago? A while ago. So that’s a little confusing but OK… It tries to make it simple by giving me this:

In short: pick a design and a page to start with. Alrighty… I pick the “Notebook” theme and the “Welcome” page design to start playing around with. The first thing that I need to remind myself here is that I need to think like my audience and not like the web professional that I believe myself to be. That said, what would I want to do? Click on things. So I try that and I get responses from just about anything: text fields, titles, images… I just type things in and they change and right-click and change layers and … well, I just go nuts. In about 4 minutes, without really trying, I’ve turned the design into this:

Yep. I’ve put text AND an image overlapping a Quicktime movie. I wanted to just stick the Quicktime movie in there under the text but that was apparently asking too much. Anyway, now that I’ve created my masterpiece with relative ease (for better or worse): what about saving and publishing? Ah there it is:

Bottom left corner: Publish. Click:

Wisely, it asks me about whether or not I understand copyright… And then it promptly flakes out. Because I don’t have a .Mac account. Blast! *sigh*

No, the Apple website has some nice tutorials on using iWeb but they seem to have obfuscated the information about how to use iWeb to publish anywhere other than on their .Mac service. “Publish to a Folder…” exists under the File menu but that still only gets us part way there. Ah… Drag. What next? Is there no solution to this problem?

currently playing: Lamb “Lusty”

• MOO
  Share your contact info and your flickr photos
  (tags: flickr photography graphics design todo)

“I’ll be there to pick you up momentarily, Michael…”

According to the Autoblog article:

You wouldn’t catch a ride to the bus station to hop on the Superbus, either. Developers plan to have the bus eschew traditional stops in favor of door-to-door deliveries via intelligent routing technology. Riders would be able to text-message the bus their location and have it meet them for pickup. Presumably a central computer would work out the most efficient route to pick up and drop off passengers that are constantly texting for transportation.

Um… Whoa.

currently playing: Peace Division “Feel My Drums”

I’ve come to visit a friend (B.G.) and hang out for a bit.  Seems his house has been moved to inside an old fortress on an island.  The fortress walls are probably 100 feet high.  He lets me in through one of the gates (I’ve rowed across a lake to get here).  Once inside, he starts to show me around.  For fun (he says) he likes to climb up new parts of the fortress and explore.  His family only recently moved in and they bought the place for a song; it’s probably worth billions and they’re just having the time of their lives exploring all of its various corners and crevices.

We climb up this one particular wall and get up to a particularly high vantage point.  We can see most of the island and the surrounding waters.  (I can’t believe I rowed across all that…)  He runs a bit of line to secure us and explains that we need to climb up over part of the wall and scoot along the edge before jumping down and across to the next ledge.  “It shouldn’t be a big deal,” he explains, prodding me onward.  But I’m real hesitant and we spend many minutes surveying the space.  The drop feels too high and too risky to me.