Lest you develop the impression from my last few posts, gentle reader, that I am a one-dimensional, Windows-hating Mac fanboy, rest assured that my reservoir of bile is nearly inexhaustible, and certainly sufficient to allow a liberal spew of disdain over all major contemporary operating systems and their associated applications.

Take, for example, iWeb. I’ve never found it very useful, but that’s primarily because I’m already comfortable with a more technical suite of applications, comprised chiefly of BBEdit, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and WordPress. Though I eschew iWeb as a development tool, its merits are nonetheless readily discernable; in a nutshell, it makes website creation very easy for users who know nothing about HTML, Javascript, XML, RSS, AJAX, or any other dollop of the alphabet soup in which the modern Web floats, and no reason or motivation to learn about it.

What’s always annoyed me about iWeb is its overbearing dependence on .Mac to deliver a seamless publishing experience. Lots of people have purchased a domain name and some rudimentary webhosting to go with it (often at a much cheaper price than .Mac, and offering far more features). But iWeb makes publishing to third-party hosts a pain in the ass. It forces you to “publish” your site to a local folder, leaving users to their own devices as far as getting those local files up to their webserver.

There can be no doubt this is designed to drive .Mac sales. Never mind the fact that it makes Apple look like a bunch of selfish pricks and casually discards the ease-of-use principle they’re otherwise justly famous for. Never mind that FTP capability is built right into the fucking OS; I guess something had to be done to shore up the sales figures for their etiolated online service, and iWeb was the chosen vehicle.

Because iWeb is thus hobbled, I was evaluating RapidWeaver on my wife’s behalf, since her nascent home business could use a simple online presence that she could maintain herself with a minimum of effort and zero need to learn the underlying technology. Shortly after I downloaded the RapidWeaver demo, I realized that our existing iLife suite was due for an update (we’re heavy iPhoto users), and I’d heard some marketing buzz about iWeb ‘08 making use of domains. I bought iLife ‘08, thinking that perhaps iWeb had finally matured to the point it was possible to stray outside its incestuous relationship with .Mac.

I was sorely disappointed. It turns out the whole “personal domain” functionality is nothing more than setting up a CNAME record for your domain that points to .Mac. This is lame, weaksauce, a cop-out. Hear me, Cupertinoids: set iWeb free.