.Mac Homepage vs. Gallery vs. Web ??

Has anyone else noticed the schizophrenic nature of publishing to the web with the Dot Mac service? It appears that Apple is just piling on capabilities but not really incorporating older procedures (and the web pages!) into the new ones. I can't figure out how to add any organization to the mess.

Homepage Notes ...
I started out several years ago, as I'm sure many others did, using the Homepage feature that you can access through the .Mac website. It is all done online. It is difficult if not impossible to change the the actual names of the files (to adjust URLs to your liking). It uses the URL form: homepage.mac.com/username/filenames and these files can be found on your iDisk inside the Site folder. I have some pages I left there but frustrated with the lack of control, I haven't done much with them.

Actual page if you care: http://homepage.mac.com/stevegandy/

iWeb ...
on the other hand "publishes" its web pages from your desktop Mac. It uses the URL form: web.mac.com/username/filenames and these files can be found on your iDisk inside the Web/Sites folder. I think iWeb looks interesting but not really all that easy to figure out. For a standard web authoring choice that isn't a lot of money I like the open source Nvu (I've used it enough to know is is okay) now morphing into KompoZer (haven't actually tried it yet).

Actual page if you care: http://web.mac.com/stevegandy/

iPhoto ...
will allow you to "publish" an album and it uses the URL form: gallery.mac.com/username and the image files can be found in the Web/Sites/_gallery folder on your iDisk. Apparently, the actual html pages are hidden from view and are called automatically by the web server at Apple .... I'm certainly speculating here but there are definitely no pages that correspond to what I see in the browser. I was exploring this as it is the way to move your iPhone photos to the web most seamlessly. However, it won't work unless you start with iPhoto. Silly me, I was trying to get it done with iWeb the web authoring tool!

Actual page if you care: http://gallery.mac.com/stevegandy

??? ...
Does this make sense to anyone? Has anyone gone through the pain to figure it all out? Any thoughts or comments? If so, perhaps we could get that person to sort it out at a CoMUG meeting soon. Or perhaps we should just build pages with other tools and add the web site folders to idisk/Web/Sites folder.

I swear I feel like Dvorak, the cranky geek, sometimes when I run into something like this. Do you think Apple still has the guy that on the payroll that knows how the "rest of us" think? Could we maybe promote his status or something?

Apple Mail Rules Bug in Leopard 10.5.1

There is a bug with Apple Mail's Rules when dealing with auto replies. If you configure an auto reply with the Rules feature, it works but the text you want to have added to the reply does not get added...kind of ruins the usefulness of auto replies. Your message sender gets his own message back without explanation.

Apple is aware of the problem and I expect a fix by the 10.5.2 update at the latest.

Adobe Bridge CS3 Bug - metadata problem

There appears to be an issue with very large Photoshop files and Bridge. You can add metadata like keywords and other IPTC entries in Photoshop but Bridge will not show them nor let you edit/add them.

Adobe Support is working with me on the issue but it appears that files over 400MB are affected. They have not admitted it yet but I can duplicate it.

Contact me if you'd like the dialog sent from the case.

iPhone Rant

Okay, I love my iPhone but....just how long is it going to take before Apple updates some basic features?

-Search! Flicking through the address book is cool but a huge waste of time when you have dozens of names that start with the same letter.

-Notes! Come on, the new Mail on my Mac with Leopard includes the notes. The notes are obviously programmed with the same code. Just do it already.

-Mail Rotation! Come on if Safari can rotate to horizontal why can't the other apps.

-Safari Homepage! Where is it? Every browser on earth has a homepage setting, where is this one?

-Oh, and what about rotating the on-screen keyboard in Mail and Text Messages. You can do it Safari for web addresses but not when you are typing messages? What the f^(#?

These are software updates and way past due now!

Leopard is Ready

10.5.1 is out and it feels much better. I can recommend it for most users that don't have particular software that hasn't been tested for it yet. See Adobe's site for info. on the Creative Suites.