The new iLife arrived today so I thought I would give the new iWeb a spin. While the web widgets seem like a good idea and allow embedding of HTML easily enough the placement and formatting around it needs work.

I am also not so sure that the Photo Albums template is an improvement. It seems like a good idea except I can’t find a way to select the photograph it uses as an index (aside from reordering the photos so the one I want as an index is first) and then the resulting page takes an eternity to load (I only tried from local storage, it may work better from a web server but I find that hard to believe). The slideshow should cope better with photos in portrait format rather than scale them so they are the same height as the landscape ones. Also if you change the background colour then don’t make it white since that will make the captions “disappear”.

There are certainly more knobs to play with but having a preference panel with default values would be a fine idea if you want a consistent site.