Mac toys, revisited

iWeb is an interesting little application and certainly tops the list when it comes to ease-of-use and reliability. In fact, those are the two reasons that make it a winner. For anyone looking to build a personal web site, the templates are decent and it’s almost impossible to do the wrong thing. It’s a double-edged sword, though. The ease of use means you can’t do anything outside of the box (or, outside of the template). So if you know HTML and want to have control of your web site, iWeb is not for you.

Sandvox might be what you’re looking for if iWeb falls just a bit short. I spent the last week redesigning the BOSS web site with it. It picks up where iWeb leaves off by offering more control over HTML, the ability to insert custom HTML components, and a number of features such as “pagelets” (embedded components such as RSS feeds) and it doesn’t require a .Mac account for any of its features. It also boasts two dozen templates, many of which are quite attractive.

KeyCue just turned 2.0 and is now a universal binary. The legibility of its shortcut display has been greatly improved too, so it’s worth the update.

iWork ‘06 is definitely worth the upgrade. Pages is still missing cross references, which is quite a shame, but otherwise it has become a very capable word processor. Now if Apple will just add a spreadsheet to the suite, I’d be completely happy. As it is, I’m able to use Microsoft Word less and less as Pages improves.