Take Control News/06-Mar-06

"Take Control of iWeb" Available for Preorder and Comments — With iLife ’06, Apple added an entirely new application: the Web authoring tool iWeb. As with most of Apple’s programs, iWeb is easy to use, but lacks significant documentation. So when Steve Sande, author of our "Take Control of Your iPod: Beyond the Music" ebook begged to write "Take Control of iWeb," we were pleased to give him the go-ahead. The book likely won’t be entirely complete until June (we encourage our authors to work sane hours, even though we aren’t always good at practicing what we preach), but since iWeb users need help now, we’re trying something unusual. As with our ebooks about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, we’ve released "Take Control of iWeb" as a pre-sale. If you purchase it, what you download is the first page, which contains the oh-so-important Check for Updates button. Click it to load the Take Control Updates page in your browser. That page normally tells you if your copy of an ebook is up-to-date and enables you to download the current version, but in this case, it also links to an iWeb-generated blog that Tonya is maintaining while she edits Steve’s text and to the draft of the first quarter of "Take Control of iWeb."

With this draft, we’re pulling back the curtain on one of our core publishing tools: QuickTopic Document Review, which provides a forum for a group of people to comment on a document. In this case, the document in question is an HTML version of the first chunk of "Take Control of iWeb" as exported from Microsoft Word. It lacks the bookmarks and internal navigation of our PDF ebooks, but you can read what Steve has written so far, make comments on anything there, and ask questions if some part of the text isn’t clear. You’ll even be able to see comments and questions others have left, and participate in any discussions that develop. Be sure to sign up for email notification on the Take Control Updates page, since that way we can tell you when we post new chunks of the manuscript for you to read and comment on. Needless to say, Steve plans to use any feedback in finalizing the ebook, and when that’s done, those who bought the pre-sale version will, of course, be able to download the fully edited and polished PDF ebook for free.

<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/iweb.html? 14@@!pt=TRK-0031-TB819-TCNEWS>

<http://web.mac.com/tonyaengst1/>

<http://www.quicktopic.com/documentcollaboration>