I was fortunate enough to arrange a meeting with Ben Counsell of Realmac Software, who was more than happy to be interviewed about his company’s brainchild.  The interview ran for about 7 minutes, covering the topics of RapidWeaver’s features, how it compares to iWeb, and some other general stuff [listen - 3.26 MB, MP3].  But enough about me: let’s get to the interview.

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All right, I’m here with Ben Counsell of Realmac Software, developers of RapidWeaver and the new competitors to iWeb.  Let’s get started.  First, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself and about Realmac.

Okay, cool.  Umm… basically, I do all the CSS and XHTML for RapidWeaver, so the templates, I code all of those.  Dan and Simon do all the Cocoa programming, the actual application.  Realmac Software is a small Mac-only software company based in Brighton, in England, on the South Coast.  We’re running for about 3 years now.  But RapidWeaver’s really taken off over the last year, been in development for 2 years, 2 and a half years, but it’s really sort of taken off over the last 6 to 12 months.

So, for those unfamiliar with RapidWeaver, could you describe it a bit?

Yeah, it’s basically an easy-to-use, powerful website creation [tool], so it’s all drag and drop.  It’s got some iLife integration; we have iPhoto and .mac, and it’s really a visual editor for your webpages.  Whereas Dreamweaver’s a lot more coding, RapidWeaver is a lot more visual.

What were some features that you couldn’t include in the program, and what would you include if you could do anything?

Features that we haven’t included… um… well, features that we haven’t included at the moment, really, are sort of e-commerce and database side of things, like PHP coding.  But we’re working e-commerce plugins and stuff like that, so those are the ones we really want to include.  I’m not sure about if we could include anything, we could get into a bit of dangerous ground there. I’m not sure, really.

How does RapidWeaver compare to iWeb?  What kinds of features does iWeb have that you guys don’t, and vice versa?

I haven’t had much of a chance to look at iWeb at the moment, been a bit busy, but I did have a 10-minute play with it earlier.  It seems really nice, actually; it’s actually inline editing, which is a cool feature, which we haven’t got, but there are advantages and disadvantages of that, where if you want to do some HTML coding, you probably want to do it in edit mode in RapidWeaver, which is a nice, easy way to look at your code and see what you’re doing, whereas iWeb is all drag-and-drop, and you can’t really do a lot of coding from what I saw.  And RapidWeaver, I’d say it’s more flexible at the moment, because we’ve got FTP publishing as well [as .mac] so you can publish to your own domain name, whereas iWeb is limited to .mac.  Also, you can edit all your file names, you can do PHP extensions, you can customize all the folders.  There are a lot more powerful pro features that we’ve included, whereas iWeb seemed a little bit limted from what I saw.

All right, thank you.  How do you guys take Internet Explorer for Windows into account?  Do you guys try to make it cross-compatible, or do you even care about it?

No we do, because it’s something like 93% of the market is on Windows, so although we don’t particularly like it, we have to code for it because if you’re not coding for the market majority, then that’s cutting out a large userbase.  All of our websites are XHTML and CSS standard, so everything validates from what RapidWeaver creates, and we test all of our templates on IE 6, Firefox, Safari, and all the major browsers, so all the code that RapidWeaver produces is guaranteed to work on all those browsers.

Do you guys have any other iLife-type of applications planned or in development?

If we… well, I wouldn’t really want to say what applications we’ve got planned, we’ve got a couple of ideas but we’re not really going to share them at the moment because we haven’t really worked on them too much at the moment.

Of course not. So you can’t tell me any of these “big plans” that you talk about on your website?

Uh, no. (Chuckles)

If you — when you get a new computer, either for personal or professional reasons, what’s one of the first things you do with it, or what are the first things you do with it?  What are the first things you install onto it, how do you configure it, and so on?

The first thing I install is RapidWeaver.  No, I don’t know… the first thing I probably set up is my mail.

(Laughs) Your mail.

I don’t know, we did get an iMac a while ago, and the first thing I played around with was Front Row.  Well that was cool, but, uh… I don’t know, really, I probably just set up my mail and stuff like that, basically.

Do you use Quicksilver?

No.

So would you say you’re living “The Life,” as described by John Gruber?

(Laughs) Um, I wish.  No, no I wouldn’t.  It’s cool, I mean we’ve been doing really well, so we’re enjoying it at the moment.  RapidWeaver’s been doing really well, so hopefully we’ll just keep going as we are.

Even with iWeb out there.

Even with iWeb out there, I think iWeb is really aimed at sort of entry level, like consumers… you want to share your photos… I think RapidWeaver comes more inbetween iWeb and Dreamweaver because we don’t want to go to a Dreamweaver stage where you’ve got code, but we don’t want to go to a really, really simple way.  We want something a bit more inbetween where you’ve got the flexibility to change all your filenames and extensions, and stuff like that.

And finally, if you could ask yourself anything, what would it be?  And answer it.

Um… why don’t I get paid more? (Laughs)

Do you know why?

Probably because my brother’s my boss.  (Laughs)

That sounds like a good reason.

Yeah.  Yeah, that’s probably the reason.  Hopefully he’ll listen to this and he’ll give me a pay raise.  (Laughs)

Well, thank you for talking with us, be sure to look for this on Deep Thought, coming up soon, probably up tonight.

Okay, cool!

Thank you.

Thanks!