The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/13/the_demise_of_iweb/

Jobs confirms iCloud's murder of iWeb

'Hey! You! Get onto my cloud'

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Cloud, 13th June 2011 18:07 GMT

Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

With the introduction of iCloud, Apple's MobileMe service is about to go the way of the buggy whip. One of its soon-to-be-obsolesced components will be the web-hosting service for sites built using Jobs & Co.'s iWeb app.

Or so says none other than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, if a purported email interaction between one fanboi and The Great Steve Himself™ is to be believed.

When asked about the end of MobileMe's one-click hosting of websites created by iLife's quick 'n' easy iWeb app, MacRumors reports [1], Jobs replied thusly:

Steve Jobs email regarding iWeb

'Concise' may be understated (source: MacRumors)

Of course, there's no way to verify the veracity of this Jobsian correspondence, but its three-character content – 2.14 per cent of a Tweet – is characteristically terse, landing as it does neatly between the four-character "Nope [2]" that Jobs reportedly sent in answer to a question about whether all Mac apps would need to be sourced from the Mac App Store, and his two-character "No [3]" when asked whether a Wi-Fi iPad would be able to internet-tether using an iPhone's 3G connection.

We're betting that the missive was actually "Sent from [Jobs'] iPhone", as alleged. After all, although Apple is famously tight-lipped about, well, about everything, Jobs does occasionally use his iPhone to tap a few words to the world outside One Infinite Loop [4].

Remember, if you will, his previous alleged emails clarifying App Store subscription rules [5], telling a pesky student to leave Apple alone [6], pointing to a VP8 video-codec analysis [7], promising iPad printing [8], discussing a patent pool [9] to "go after" Theora, and calling an analyst "nuts" [10] for saying that the iPad's Euro-launch was intentionally delayed.

Perhaps the most famous of Jobs' iPhoneian pronoucements was his response [11] to a developer who had eloquently argued to be allowed to keep the name of his app, iPodRip: "Change your apps name," Jobs tapped. "Not that big of a deal."

If Jobs' latest missive is authentic – and MacRumors contends that its email headers appear to be the real deal – the end of MobileMe' web-hosting service is no surprise.

As we've mentioned before [12], iCloud is ending the life of multiple MobileMe services and, in the process, subtly shifting your use of online files and data towards Apple's applications ecosystem. Also to be deep-sixed by iCloud, apparently, are the browser-based iDisk store-whatever-the-hell-you-want cloudy file-syncing and online-storage service, and MobileMe's browser-accessible Gallery for photos and videos.

When a certain Reg reporter dubbed the twenty-teens as the "Out of Control Decade [13]", not a few readers suggested that a tinfoil hat might be an appropriate fashion statement. Now, as Jobs & Co.'s iCloud moves access to files and other content from the open web to iOS and Mac OS apps only, that Reynolds Wrap [14] chapeau may not be quite so ludicrous, eh? ®