Is iWeb Coming To The iPad?
April 4, 2011
According to a recently discovered patent filing, Apple may bring its iWeb application to the iPad. This news, which was first announced by Patently Apple, would bring another part of the company’s popular iLife suite to the iOS device, after GarageBand and iMovie for iPad debuted earlier this year.
Patent application 20110074710, which was filed in April 2010, lists apps that have been designed to work with gestures and more specifically, touch screen displays. These include Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and iWeb.
Of course, the first three are already available for the iPad and have been for a while. However, iWeb hasn’t yet jumped to iOS.
At least not yet.
Initially released with iLife ’06, iWeb is a template-based WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website creation tool. Although it integrates with other applications in the iLife suite, its limitations make it mainly a tool for beginning web developers.
For example, iWeb ’11 users can only use the application’s built-in templates, which cannot be edited using HTML code.
In addition, CSS files are created for each page, rather than a single stylesheet for the entire website.
Still, releasing an iPad version of iWeb would have its benefits. For one, it would allow iWeb users to edit sites without the need of a laptop or desktop. Second, iWeb for the iPad would almost certainly be priced at $4.99, like GarageBand and iMovie for the iPad. This new app could help Apple introduce website creation to new users who may not have previously attempted to do so.
What do you think? Should Apple release iWeb for the iPad? Leave your comments below.