Will iWeb still be supported/updated?

I was also wondering the same thing Eric...although I still use MobileMe to host and publish my business website. May I ask who you use to host your site and how you publish to it through iWeb? From what I have heard I may need to find an alternative and I rely on my website to do business daily. Any response would be appreciated. Thanks.

Apparently Steve Jobs just informed someone who emailed him that iWeb will go away along with MobileMe hosting after June 2012.

Unfortunately this is just another example of Apple not being sensitive (understatement) to their users who used their products and services because we thought Apple was dedicated to them (both the products and their users). Products and services that have or will disappear:

iMovie HD

iDVD

iWeb

MobileMe

MobileMe Web Gallery?

This trend is the very worst part of Apple.

For those who use iWeb a lot, I hope you are right and iWeb as an app survives. But given Apple's history, my money is on the demise of all of these services and apps:

iWeb

iDVD

MobileMe Web Gallery

I really have lost confidence in Apple's understanding how much pain they cause when they discontinue a product or services. It started with killing iMovieHD which many of us had hundreds of hours of effort in. Replacing it with iMovie08 but with no ability to convert iMovieHD projects to the new product was very costly to me in time. It's clear Apple's opinion is that when they have a better idea, their customers will just have to suffer and convert.

As far as I'm concerned, eventhough I've been an Apple addict for years (I bought my first Apple II in 1981 !!! 30 years ago!!!), this last event (the end of MobileMe and iWeb) puts an end between me and proprietary solutions.

When the company behind the proprietary files (the domain file of iWeb) decides it, everything is trashed and you have to re-do all your work from scratch!

I know that iWeb runs under Lion dp4 and you'll say that I can keep on developping my Web sites using it (at least with a different web hosting than my iDisk..), but my fear is that one day or an other, an "evolution" or a "great new revolutionnary feature" of Lion will introduce an incompatibility with iWeb and it won't work anymore with no hope for the incompatibility to be fixed

Apple may even decide to make iWeb and Lion incompatible (if they develop a new offer or service that sees iWeb as a competitor). Look at FrontRow! Who will explain me how a simple fullscreen interface to read music and video can be incompatible with Lion if it's not voluntary from Apple to sell more AppleTV?

I definitly don't understand Apple anymore. iWeb is so simple, it has generates thousand of switches from Windows PCs to Mac.

How can they trash it???

I can understand the evolution for iMovie, the fact that iDVD is considered as an old-fashionned solution for sharing videos, but.... iWeb!!!

And in the meantime PhotoBooth and Chess still deserve evolutions with Lion... :-(

Here is the text of the email, as per the MacRumor site:

===

Q: Dear Mr. Jobs,

Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?

I have invested a lot of time and effort and the thought of re-training ***** more than mobileme ever did.

A: Yep.

===

Note the "alternative website builder and..."

Hard to know if Jobs was replying to both or not, but one could assume he might be?

R.

Steve Jobs said mobileme was not Apples finest hour..... He underestimates it's success in drawing customer base from MS.

I moved to Mac from PC because I discovered IWeb. A one step publishing software web space package. So simple and easy to use, albeit limited and unpredictable in browsers other than Safari. (When you check out your site in other browsers they are sometimes quite different, particularly text and search windows). But I'm really disappointed that it's being dropped, it has not been updated in the last iLife update and it was predictable that support was to be withdrawn.

I think Apple do not see a money making future in it, there are too many browsers to support that it cannot control and have decided to put their resources into the big move of icloud which will generate money in the way iTunes has, building it's core business. it's sad but predictable.

iWeb is an app and will still work. You can still use it even if it is dropped - not suddenly going to stop working just because Apple decide not to update it any longer.

If you still have it on your Mac, then continue to use it.

Eric, I had an upgrade for iWeb about 3 weeks ago, to 3.0.4 (601) . I was curious why they did that. Would you tell me what hosting service your using (with iWeb) to upload your pages to? Also, is that hosting company reputable. I hopet his helps you.

iWeb hasn't reached it's EOL as yet and there must have been some stability issues that needed to be addressed:

this update improves overall stability and addresses a number of minor issues.

This appears to be minor fix but doesn't represent an intention to continue supporting iWeb after MobileMe is dropped.

I moved over to HostExcellence.com and am very happy with the move.

Thanks Toad for that info.

Y'all keep comfusing the death if iWeb hosting in MoblieMe as the death of iWeb. iWeb still works in Lion. Yay!

I love (and hate, when it is close to the end) the coundown clock as my iWeb site is an annual event. I'm told it won't work unless hosted by MobileMe. Still, iWeb tutorials tell how to upload your site to another host. Time to learn.

I love Apple. They almost always build in transition time (FREE MobileMe for a YEAR!) or support for old software built for older operating systems. (Yes, I know they've discontinued Rosetta. How may years do you expect them to support programs written for PowerPC macs?) Most Windows users have to buy a new PC with an OS upgrade. I'm grateful Apple doesn't throw everything out with the bath water.

Of course your site will work when it is no longer hosted on MobileMe. Correct, there are certain aspects that will not work, specifically the iWeb hit counter, blog comments and some other things, but there are workarounds that can be used for this.

What it boils down to is that you can have a fully functioning website built using iWeb, but not published on MobileMe.