Sometimes I want to make a quick and dirty website. A site that’s just as much about the visual as the content. An electronic brochure site springs to mind or the recent website I made to control my home automation setup. A site that’s visually appealing, yet functional, and at the same time I’d prefer to not spend ages getting it setup.

Apple recently released iAd Producer. It’s a piece of software designed exclusively for creating ads for Apple iAd platform. I downloaded it to have a play and immediately I thought that it could be great for the aforementioned usages. Yes there is iWeb, but iAd Producer has support for a lot of nice little HTML5 animations, transitions etc that would really make a site feel more “app like”. The interface also means that it’s very quick and easy to setup an iAd.

In it’s current state however, there’s no way to add your own code. This is really frustrating as it’s so close to a (basic) HTML5 WYSIWYG app developer. Yes you can export the code it generates to HTML and CSS and then hack in the extra links and functionality you want, but that’s hardly a productive workflow.

Here’s hoping Apple might see fit to bring some of these neat features to iWeb (which seems to be dead on the vine right now), or add a bit more power to the current iAd Producer interface.

The basic feel of this application is great, and a similar setup would be great if Apple ever allowed people to produce personal apps as part of the iLife suit (and compete with Android’s App Inventor)

Here’s hoping there are some interesting future version of this product, or an offshoot of it.