Define “Supported”

August 16, 2007

Steve Jobs in his recent keynote where he introducted the new iMac, new iLife, new iWork, etc had these new features to tell us about iWeb:

iWebNewFeatures.png

  • Live Web Widgets
  • Google AdSense
  • Media inded page
  • Personal domain support
  • Theme switching

It was “Personal domain support” that got my attention. Steve barely mentioned it. In fact, here are his entire remarks about it:

iWebJaneDotCom.png

Personal domain support. If you have a personal domain, that’s now going to be supported, which is nice.

At 51:38 Jobs starts talking about iWeb.

At 53:51 he introduces Personal Domain Support:

At 53:56 he moves on to theme switching.

“Oh,” I thought, “that sounds cool. I might actually use iWeb if I didn’t have to attach it to the hugely mediocre .Mac.”

What’s that?

Oh.

You have to let Apple host your domain in order for it to work.

Of course. Why would Apple want to let us use our own domains at our own servers? How would they make money off of that?

“By selling you iWeb as part of annual updates to iLife on the Mac you bought?”

Nah, why stop at $2,000 when you can keep paying $100/year to use it like they want you to?

He didn’t have to say it out loud, he could have put it under the license plate on the slide above:

(For domains hosted at .Mac)

That’s all it would have taken.

.Mac may be a great idea, but in reality, it’s awful. The worst money I’ve ever spent on anything Apple related (hrm, well I did buy one of those crap wireless Mighty Mouse things, which sucks just as badly). It took me months to be able to use it at all. My Mac just refused to communicate with it, so there it sat. So for $100/year, I lost 3 trying to get it to just work at all.

Here’s just a recent sampling of crashlogs:

  1. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-15_10-55-19.log
  2. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-15_11-55-51.log
  3. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-15_12-54-29.log
  4. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-15_13-54-04.log
  5. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-15_14-57-12.log
  6. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-16_09-16-44.log
  7. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-16_10-16-31.log
  8. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-16_11-15-39.log
  9. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-16_12-18-13.log
  10. dotMacTranslator.crash_2007-08-16_15-16-43.log
  11. dotmacsyncclient.crash_2007-08-15_11-52-38.log
  12. dotmacsyncclient.crash_2007-08-16_15-14-19.log

Just randomly, out of the blue, dotMac stuff has been crashing. Mind you, I haven’t touched anything related to my .Mac account in months, and then just suddenly, crash, crash, crash, crash. At least 50% of the time I try to open the .Mac preference panel, System Preferences locks up and I have to force-quit it. Nothing else on my system is acting up. Just .Mac.

And now they want to host my entire domain?

I think not.

ps - note that the link to the keynote will probably only be good until the next keynote address they put up.

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