MBW Picks

14 responses so far ↓

• 1 MBW: New iMacs; iLife & iWork ‘08; .Mac; Anti-picks; and Merlin’s dirty little secret | 43 Folders // Aug 10, 2007 at 10:40 am

  […] course, when I chose iCal as my anti-pick, I said it with love. Much […]

• 2 piminnowcheez // Aug 10, 2007 at 2:37 pm

  I’d have to agree with Merlin; iCal is infuriating in all the things it doesn’t do, that it oughta do.

  Not infuriating, but kind of frustrating: Leo carrying on, and everyone else agreeing, that iWeb is a trap, without ever mentioning alternatives that they like. I was just about to go poking around iWeb, and I’m happy to have been saved, but I got nothin’ to go on for where to look next.

• 3 mayson // Aug 10, 2007 at 3:31 pm

  @piminnowcheez — I always thought iWeb was kind of a restricted way to develop, but really, it’s great if you want to put something together fast, and don’t know/want to learn the technical side of things. Leo referred to how you don’t really have to know HTML anymore, but…you do if you want to use a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress. That is unless you use a given template and don’t want to customize/modify (in that case - you’re kinda in the same trap you were in with iWeb).

  We have a client that only develops sites in iWeb. When he signed up with us, I thought his business didn’t have a bright future - but he’s been going strong for about 1.5 years. Depending on what you are doing and who your target is - a lot of people still only want a 5 page brochure site that looks great. iWeb is perfect for that.

  The code iWeb generates is CRAZY though!

  Apps I use for development include:

  - CMS’s like Wordpress and Drupal
  - TextMate
  - Coda
  - DreamWeaver
  - CocoaMySQL
  - Photoshop Elements (ha! I know)

  For what it’s worth…

• 4 Max // Aug 10, 2007 at 8:21 pm

  iCal is great. I use it every day. I haven’t yet listened to the episode so I am not aware of Merlin’s dislikes. I suppose there are some areas in which it could be improved. I must admit though - I do prefer Outlook’s calendar.

  Coda is what Leo uses. It his mentioning of it that made my check it out. I love it and use it every day now.

• 5 piminnowcheez // Aug 10, 2007 at 11:48 pm

  Thanks for the recommendations. I was sensitive to Leo’s comments about iWeb exactly because I was looking for something that would let me start from zero web-development knowledge (where I am now), but transition over time to ALL-POWAHFUL!! (BWAH-HAHAHAHA!) as I learned along the way. So the trap Leo warned of was something I particularly wanted to avoid.

  I have a copy of TextMate, which I have no idea how to use; I think I have access to DreamWeaver at work; and I had a look at Coda which looks good as far as I can tell, but is a tad spendy for where I’m at now. Maybe I’ll try starting with DreamWeaver and have another look at Coda in time.

  Thanks again.

  Oh, and: iCal isn’t great. It’s *almost* great, which is what makes it infuriating.

• 6 Geoff Evans // Aug 11, 2007 at 1:05 am

  Microsoft Office would have to be the worst app pre installed
  Also i would have to say that iCal and Digital Color meter would have to be great apps

• 7 David // Aug 12, 2007 at 12:12 pm

  I like iCal. There are two things missing from it for my uses (which do not include group scheduling):

  Customizable snooze (the intervals that are offered are not often what I want).
  Two-way web calendar. Sometimes I’m out at an office site and want to enter an event on my iCal; I can’t do it from the web. Wish I could.

• 8 Nick // Aug 12, 2007 at 6:40 pm

  “I have a copy of TextMate, which I have no idea how to use”

  You can mark-up pretty quickly in TextMate by writing plaintext structured with Markdown syntax:

  http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

  TextMate has a bundle to automatically convert Markdown-formatted text to HTML. That’s a nice way to write HTML in TextMate — although not the only way, of course.

  But you’d probably want to learn HTML first to have some idea of what you are short-cutting around. HTML isn’t hard to learn, although using what you learn imaginatively and well is another matter, of course. There are good basic books on it, and a few good online resources to step you through learning the tags and putting them together — here’s one:

  http://www.htmldog.com/

  If you want to use a WYSIWYG editor, then NVU is fine and costs nothing. It’s a kind-of Mozilla offshoot, building on the old Netscape Composer:

  http://www.nvu.com/index.php

• 9 David Lanier // Aug 12, 2007 at 7:28 pm

  For a pretty easy, I’m just getting started, visual html editor, to stand in for iWeb, you could check out nVu. http://www.nvu.com/ Sure, it lacks Mac spiffiness, but it’s free and opensource.

• 10 piminnowcheez // Aug 14, 2007 at 2:40 pm

  Thanks for more good recommendations. What a swell crowd that hangs around here.

• 11 Robert Gottlieb // Aug 17, 2007 at 3:43 am

  RE: David and two-way calendering:

  There is something called GCalDaemon: http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/ that basically sync’s iCal to your Google Calendar. I use it and it works quite well. Just follow the directions exactly as they are written - like it is a recipe.

• 12 tycho garren // Aug 21, 2007 at 1:00 pm

  finder of course, but I hold out for the new things in leopard.

  iCal and TextEdit.

• 13 wess // Sep 2, 2007 at 11:54 am

  i’m curious as to what merlin uses instead of ical?

• 14 mayson // Sep 2, 2007 at 12:37 pm

  @wess - I think he’s gone to Google Calendar… check out episode 55.

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