How to Make iLife '06 Seem Like '07: Ten Tools that Take iLife to a New Level
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Apple’s iLife is a phenomenal suite of tools that lets every Mac user manage and create amazing projects from their digital photos, movies, and music. With every version, the tools available have become ever more impressive; and iLife has offered new and creative themes, projects, and ways to capture and share your memories and creative spirit.
Yet even the most creative tools can begin to seem stale after a year and half with no updates. While no one can predict what new features and themes Apple will include when it releases the next version of iLife, there are plenty of options for expanding iLife ’06 to give you more artistic options.
Improving iWeb
iWeb, which is the newest of Apple’s iLife applications, makes it incredibly easy for anyone to create amazing websites. You can pick one of Apple’s preconfigured themes and modify it, download additional themes, and even create your own. But iWeb still has some areas that can be improved upon, particularly if you want to create multiple sites or publish to a web server other than the Apple .Mac service.
The following three tools are must-haves for many iWeb users.
Easy iWeb Publisher
One of the big drawbacks of iWeb is that while it can upload a site to a .Mac account, sites not published to .Mac are simply created in a folder on your hard drive. You can use any FTP program to upload sites to a web server, but Easy iWeb Publisher is a very simple tool that makes the process incredibly easy.
More importantly, it offers the option of uploading only files that have been changed since the last time you published a site. Given the number of files and folders (and the complexity of their hierarchy) that iWeb generates, determining this manually can be a challenge, but uploading an entire site when only a few changes have been made can be very time-consuming. Easy iWeb Publisher provides a perfect solution.
iWebSites
One of the biggest hassles of working with iWeb is that although it enables you to create multiple sites, all your sites are opened every time you launch it and all your sites are published together. This is particularly problematic if you are designing multiple sites to be published to different locations.
iWebSites is a donationware tool that enables you to create sites that open and publish separately from each other. It also enables you to duplicate existing sites to merge multiple sites into one.
iWebEnhancer
iWeb is designed so that you never have to see or edit HTML code by hand. However, this creates a problem if you want to add small pieces of code (such as for Google AdSense, track back utilities, or any other web services that require you to add pre-fashioned segments of code to your site).
iWebEnhancer is a shareware tool that enables you to place code as a text element on iWeb pages, which it then converts into standard HTML tags for you. This provides a great way to drop some code into your site without having to actually edit pages by hand.