Yesterday, while browsing Apple's site, a shrewd user noticed something quite out of the ordinary. The Garage Band section of the site contained links to "iWeb" and "iLife '06 features", none of which exists officially at the moment. This slip up hints that the newest version of the iLife suite of applications will be released soon, maybe even at the MacWorld Expo.

iWeb is listed alongside iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand and iTunes under the "iLife Community Discussion" header, as being part of the new iLife suite, but nothing is known about what type of program this will be.

Apple has changed the site since the incident, but, fortunately, a screenshot remains, although heavily compressed it still contains the slipped information.
The screenshot itself has been the subject of some debate. For one thing it was taken from someone running Windows, which has made some people in the mac community skeptic, thinking this might be a hoax; secondly, the site talks of iTunes 4.9 but the latest version of iTunes is 6.0.1... a look at the official page shows that there too, iTunes 4.9 is mentioned; last but not least, the heavily encoded state of the screenshot makes it easy to conceal photo-manipulation and editing.

Despite all this, there is very convincing evidence that the screenshot is real, provided by Google. Doing a simple Google search for "Apple iWeb" and going to the second page of results (at the time of this writing, the location can change at any time) reveals the last indexed version of the page in question, dated 4 Jan 2006, with the word "iWeb" big and bolded in the description. Following the 'Cached' link will open the 'screenshot' version of the site in all its revealing glory.

So that's one thing we are very likely to hear about next Tuesday... now what of the others?

Here are the screenshots, from left to right: site as it is now, Google search results, and the cached version: