How many times has this happened to you? You use the shapes in iWeb to just kinda toss together an amalgam of inspiration and, suddenly, you find yourself with nothing less than pure serendipity dripping from your mouse cursor!! Just something about the way the shapes came together tells a story that you want to unleash into an unsuspecting world!! Unfortunately, a sense of “scale” wasn’t on your mind when you were noodle doodlin’ and your masterwork is...well, the word “expansive” wouldn’t do it justice. From the title bar all the way down to the Apple logo, it doesn’t really lend itself to sharing the page with anything else.

Not to worry though, your years with the Mac has stood you in good stead as you firmly press command and stroke the A key to select all. Now, leaving a finger on the all powerful command key, you amble over to the G key and confidently punch it.

>Boop<

Something’s amiss, the objects didn’t group. Maybe you hit the Y key by mistake. Staring intently at the keyboard you check under the one finger, yup, that’s command. You carefully position the other finger over the G key and check yourself a few times before pressing again and...

>Boop<

By this point you know you MUST have been struck by some especially insidious virus! Yes, your only connection to the electronic world has fallen prey to some ne’er do well with an Intel chip on his shoulder. Other virus writers? You KNOW when you’re infected because they do all sorts of malicious things. This core of evil has done them all one better. This person has infiltrated your network, gotten access to your system, found your iWeb application and has rendered your application “GROUP-less!” It’s not in the menus, it’s not activated by a key command, they even went as far as wiping it from iWeb’s help file, leaving only a reference to .Mac groups and two other useless entries.

>Boop< (no, still doesn’t work)

While

it may seem that this was the case, of course it wasn’t. iWeb has never HAD a Group function. You can select individual objects and move them all at once, you can even change the attributes of all the selected objects as well. But if you need to resize them, you have to resize each member of the “group” separately then try to line them back up. Depending on the number and size of the shapes

(like this group for example) you’re talking about a lot of extra work for something that should be relatively simple.

Let’s look at another example. At the top of this page are objects that, after drawn, look the same. However, one draws onto the screen as one big graphic, the other draws each individual graphic separately, increasing the load time for an already speed hampered website. Being able to group would solve a few simple problems and would be pretty darn nice!

Coming from the “World o’ Keynote”, we’ve already been smitten by a un-groupable situation and have come up with a solution, henceforth known as the “Preview Passthru” and it’s very simple. All you do is copy your grouped items, open Preview, and do a command-N to create a new image from the clipboard. Now, you can either copy and paste this back into iWeb and resize freely OR you can save it as a file for use later in just about any other program you can think of. That’s the power of OSX’s PDF foundation at work. You can make your “grouped” shapes larger or smaller and they maintain their smoooooth curves.

I’ll be posting just the tip to another page so as to “make a long story short” (and I’ll link to it from here). So now you know. And knowing, is .5 the battle...

Actually “the b” is half “the battle”... or maybe “attle”? So, if you see half “the battle” would that be Seeattle?

Clearly, a question for the ages.