... The entire process follows the golden Apple rule- sounds complicated, turns out it’s not. As with all new technology, it is not foolproof and it may occasionally suggest that this person is Dave, when it is really Liz, but it is easily rectified by telling iPhoto (by simply double clicking ... Read review
Enjoy, customise and create with your photos, movies, music and web pages on your Mac like ... more
never before.iPhoto 09 Major photo opportunityiPhoto makes managing your photos as easy as taking them. It helps you organise your photos so you can find them f...
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iLife '09 makes it easier than ever to get the most out of the photos, movies, and music ... more
on your Mac. Organize and search your photos by faces and places in iPhoto. Make a great-looking movie in minutes and edit with precision in iMovie. Learn to play ...
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iLife '09 makes it easier than ever to get the most out of the photos, movies, and music ... more
on your Mac. Organize and search your photos by faces and places in iPhoto. Make a great-looking movie in minutes and edit with precision in iMovie. Learn to play piano and guitar, or compose and record your own songs with the new guitar amps and stompboxes in GarageBand. Apple iLife '09 includes: iPhoto '09 iMovie '09 GarageBand '09 iWeb '09 iDVD '09 iPhoto '09. Major photo opportunity. iPhoto makes managing your photos as easy as taking them. It helps you organize your photos so you can find them fast. Edit them so they look their best. And share them with your friends and family. Faces - Organise photos by who's in them. People are often your most important photo subjects. But it's difficult to find every photo of Dad or the grandkids without combing through your entire library. That's why iPhoto '09 introduces Faces: a new feature that automatically detects and even recognises faces in your photos. First iPhoto scans your library to detect photos of people. Then it matches faces that look like the same person. That makes it easy to add names to your photos. And it helps you find the people you're looking for -- even in the largest photo libraries. Places - Organise and explore photos by location. When you get back from a trip, you want to share your travel experiences with everyone. iPhoto helps you explore your travel photos with a new feature called Places. This feature uses data from GPS-enabled cameras or the camera on iPhone to categorise photos by location and convert GPS location tags to common, user-friendly names. So without any effort, pictures you took of the Eiffel Tower are labeled with easily searchable names like "France", "Paris" and "Eiffel Tower". If you don't have a GPS-enabled camera or iPhone, you can still make the most of Places. Add locations to your photos by typing the name of a place, entering an address or dropping a pin on a map. Then, when you want to find photos you shot in New York City or the Grand Canyon, just type the place name in the search field. Themed Slideshows - Show off your photos onscreen. A great way to show off your photos onscreen is with a slideshow. iPhoto '09 brings photos to life with six themes that let you create beautiful slideshows in seconds. Slideshow themes include Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns and Sliding Panels. Every slideshow uses face detection to position photos correctly and keep the faces onscreen. Online Sharing - Publish directly to Facebook and Flickr. iPhoto '09 lets you publish photos direct
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never before.iPhoto 09 Major photo opportunityiPhoto makes managing your photos as easy as taking them. It helps you organise your photos so you can find them fast. Edit them so they look their best. And share them with your friends and family.Whats new in iPhoto 09Organise Keep track of your photos by who, where and when.Its so easy to take digital photos that before you know it, you have thousands. iPhoto gives you more ways to keep track of your photos by organising them according to whos in your pictures, where you took them and when you took them.Faces to see.iPhoto 09 introduces Faces: a new feature that automatically detects and even recognises faces in your photos. First iPhoto scans your library to detect photos of people. Then it matches faces that look like the same person. That makes it easy to add names to your photos. And it helps you find the people youre looking for. Clicking the Faces view shows you a corkboard featuring a snapshot for each person youve named. iPhoto suggests a set of possible matches you can confirm with a click.Places to go.Places allows you to search and sort photos by location, using data from any GPS-enabled camera or iPhone. Dont have a GPS-enabled camera or iPhone? You can still use Places by adding your own location information: Just start typing and iPhoto instantly gives you a list of locations to choose from. Want to add places to lots of photos? Select an Event, an album or a group of photos shot in the same place, and iPhoto can add your location information to all of them at once.When you feel like exploring, click Places to navigate your photos by location. Find photos on a map, or use the column browser to click through location names from country to state to city right down to points of interest like the Empire State Building or the Grand Canyon to see all the photos taken there.Events to remember.iPhoto helps eliminate clutter in your photo library by automatically organising your photos by Event. When you import photos taken on a single day, iPhoto groups them together as an Event. You can label each Event with a meaningful name like Karens wedding or Nathans graduation, so you can find everything easily.The search field in iPhoto lets you search your entire photo library fast. Type a word or part of a word to search by person, location, title, album, event or keyword, and see your results in an instant.Improve Get rid of red-eye, crop, retouch, make colours pop.You dont need expensive photo editing software to turn so-so shots into perfect pictures. iPhoto09 introduces a set of improved editing tools to make your photos look their best. A new checkbox in the Saturation slider makes the colours in your photos pop without affecting skin tones. The Definition slider improves clarity and brings out detail. The Retouch brush adds a Detect Edges feature that prevents blurring of detail when you remove spots or blemishes over solid edges. And the Auto Red-Eye tool works with face detection to remove red-eye with just one click.Enjoy Watch a slideshow on your Mac, iPod or iPhone.A great way to show off your photos onscreen is with a slideshow. iPhoto 09 brings photos to life with six themes that let you create beautiful slideshows in seconds. Slideshow themes include Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns and Sliding Panels. Every slideshow uses face detection to position photos correctly and keep the faces onscreen.Want to skip ahead or go back to a slide you liked? A filmstrip at the bottom of the screen lets you navigate your slides with a click. You can also change the music or adjust the speed to go better with your photos. When youre happy with your slideshow, you can export it as a movie to iTunes and view it on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.Share Online Publisher your photos to Facebook, Flickr and MobileMe.Wouldnt it be great if you could share your photos on Facebook in one step, without leaving iPhoto? iPhoto 09 lets you publish photos directly to Facebook with just a few clicks. Select the photos you want to share and click the Facebook button.iPhoto converts names you added using Faces to Facebook name tags. Whats more, as soon as you post new photos of them on your Facebook page, notifications are sent to the friends youve named who also have Facebook IDs.Sharing on Flickr is just as easy: Just click the Flickr button. When you share your photos on Flickr, the locations you added using Places appear on Flickr photo maps.Once you share your photos, iPhoto creates Facebook and Flickr albums for them in the Source list. Add, remove or edit these photos, and theyre automatically updated on Facebook and Flickr.Share in Print Design custom photo books, cards and calendars.Its one thing to see your photos online. Its entirely different to see them on your wall or in a beautiful book. iPhoto makes it drag-and-drop easy to design your own soft cover book, wire-bound book or hardcover book complete with a photo-wrapped cover and matching dust jacket. Make your travel books even more special with custom maps that use location data from your photos to illustrate your journey. Create a personalised photo calendar to hang on your wall. Send photo greeting cards and postcards featuring your friends and family. Or order professional prints in a variety of sizes and have them shipped directly to your door.iMovie 09 Movies that arent a productionMaybe you want to throw together a few video clips. Maybe you have more time and want to fine-tune every edit. Or maybe you just want to flip through clips the way you flip through album covers in iTunes. iMovie lets you do it allthen share it all.Whats new in iMovie 09:Advanced Drag and Drop Movie editing gets easier with new features.iMovie 08 introduced drag-and-drop editing a fun and easy way to make movies, even if youve never edited a single frame. iMovie 09 takes drag-and-drop editing even further. For starters, it gives you more ways to add clips to your project: Now you can replace or insert clips using a single pop-up menu. Or edit just your audio. Drag-and-drop editing includes advanced options like cutaways, picture-in-picture and green-screen effects. And as you work, you can drag and drop markers to help you remember specific points in your project.Precision Editor Skim and click your clips to fine-tune every edit.Perfectionists, rejoice. iMovie 09 introduces a new feature that makes it easy to fine-tune every edit. Its called the Precision Editor, and it displays a magnified filmstrip that shows exactly where one clip ends and the next begins so you can precisely edit your video. Skim each clip up close and identify how much to keep and where to cut. Edit audio and video independently, so you can use the sound from one clip with the video from another. Reposition and adjust the duration of titles and transitions without leaving the Precision Editor.Themes and Maps Enhance your movies or add an animated map.More of an instant-gratification type? Enhance your movie in minutes with new dynamic themes. Choose a theme such as Bulletin Board, Filmstrip or Comic Book and apply it to your project instantly. iMovie 09 does the rest, adding animated titles and sophisticated transitions automatically. Your themed project plays right away, so you dont have to wait to see the results. Choose a theme at the start of a project or apply a theme to an existing project. iMovie themes look great without help, but you can easily add, swap or delete elements to customise your project. Try a different transition. Swap a clip or two. Even change the theme altogether. iMovie remembers text you typed into title placeholders and changes only the theme.Video Stabilisation Reduce camera shake in your clips.Even the steadiest hand can jostle a camera. But now those perfect if slightly wobbly moments wont be left on the cutting-room floor. New video stabilisation in iMovie 09 analyses how much your camera was moving while you were recording, then automatically reduces camera shake. Stabilise on a clip-by-clip basis or analyse all your video for stabilisation (the latter may take a while, but its worth it). The results look surprisingly smooth and professional.iMovie 09 lets you adjust smoothness with a simple slider, so you can bring back some natural camera movement for effect where you need it. iMovie also identifies moments when the camera was so shaky that the footage cant be fixed. It marks those clips with a squiggly red line, so you can choose to hide them.New Titles, Transitions and Effects Choose and apply with a click.Put the finishing touches on your movie with new titles, transitions and video effects. iMovie 09 introduces 18 new animated titles and the Title Browser gives you a sneak peek at every one. Find a title you like and drag it onto any video clip. Or drag a title where there isnt any video to open a new Preview Palette with great animated backgrounds. Choose one you like and your title appears over it.iMovie 09 also features eight new transitions. Preview them by skimming over the transitions in the Preview Palette. One click picks the perfect transition and applies it instantly.To change the look of your movie, choose from 19 new one-click video effects, including Aged Film, Dream, Sci-Fi and Cartoon.Fast or slow motion adds comic relief or dramatic depth. Both are just a slide away in iMovie 09. Drag a slider to adjust the speed of any clip. Or reverse it with a click. All your adjustments happen in real time.Library Browser Find and browse all of your video, all in one place.iMovie 09 makes it easy to enjoy your footage, even if you dont want to make a movie. The new, full-screen Library Browser puts your entire video library at your fingertips. Flip through video just as you flip through music in your iTunes library using full-screen Cover Flow. Toggle between Events and projects, or browse clips from your library and play them full screen. Even the clip-skimming feature works in full-screen mode: Roll over a filmstrip to display the related clip full screen.GarageBand 09 Musicians wanted: No experience necessaryWelcome to the school of rock. A Mac-sized practice space. Your own recording studio. If you want to learn to play an instrument, write music or record a song, GarageBand can help whether youre a rookie or a rock star.Whats new in GarageBand 09:Basic Lessons Take piano and guitar lessons.GarageBand 09 introduces Basic Lessons: the easiest way to learn piano and guitar, right on your Mac. Follow along at your own pace with interactive lessons that teach you the fundamentals through HD video instruction, synchronised notation and animated onscreen instruments.Play your way through a series of nine lessons that get you ready to play an entire song. Learn by repetition. Slow things down or repeat any part to get it right. Basic Lessons give you complete control over how you learn. Apple instructors never get tired, keep you motivated and put you in charge of your lesson. And when youre more comfortable, you can practice your new skills with a complete backing band.Artist Lessons Learn from your favourite artists.Sure, music video games are fun. But nothing is more authentic than learning to play a real song on a real instrument. And who better to teach you that song than the artist who made it famous? Introducing Artist Lessons in GarageBand 09 (sold separately). Have Sting teach you how to play Roxanne, Colbie Caillat teach you how to play Bubbly, Fall Out Boy teach you how to play I Dont Care, and many more. Browse, preview and purchase Artist Lessons from the Lesson Store inside GarageBand. Then get step-by-step instructions for chords, finger positions, and techniques from the people who know your favourite songs best.Play along with your artist/instructor or take your skills to the next level and jam with the original band. You can even select and listen to individual instruments from multitrack recordings available only on GarageBand. Want to hear what Stings guitar sounds like on its own? Think youre ready to sit in for Colbie Caillat? Artist Lessons let you control the mix and instrumentation, so you can hear or play whatever you want even slow things down to make learning easier.Artist Lessons also give you something you wont find anywhere else: the story behind the song. Sit back and listen to each artist tell you how the song was written and what inspired it. The Artist Lessons library keeps growing, so youll always have songs to learn (and learn about).New Guitar Features Re-create legendary guitar rigs.GarageBand 09 puts rock history on display with new amps and stompbox effects that re-create the sound of legendary guitar rigs right on your Mac. Just plug in an electric guitar and play through five new amps modelled after the most revered in the world. Choose from over 30 complete rigs, including Brit Pop, Honky Tonk, Lowdown Blues, Seattle Sound, Stadium Solo and Woodstock Fuzz. Add virtual stompboxes that reproduce classic foot pedals, including Fuzz Machine, Blue Echo and Auto-Funk. Then get a 3D view of your rig complete with amp, speaker cabinet and stompboxes.Magic GarageBand Jam Play with a full-screen band.When its time to focus on jamming, turn your Mac into a full-screen stage with Magic GarageBand Jam. Assign instruments and styles to your guitarist, bassist, drummer and keyboard player. Shuffle instruments randomly to instantly hear a new sound from your backing band. Create a custom mix using volume sliders or by muting and soloing any instrument. Quickly navigate to any part of the song using the new Arrangement Track, or just repeat your favourite part. When youre happy with rehearsals, you can record right into Magic GarageBand.iWeb 09 Web design for the rest of us.Designing a website may seem difficult, but with iWeb its easily within your reach. Create your site using themes. Customise it with photos, movies, text and widgets. Then publish to MobileMe or any other hosting service. iWeb even notifies Facebook when your site changes and adds a link to your profile so your friends stay up to date.Whats new in GarageBand 09:Design Build a website starting with templates and themes.A Mac and iWeb 09.* Thats all you need to design and publish your own personal website. Start by picking an Apple-designed theme. Each theme comes with coordinated fonts, backgrounds and colours to give your site a consistent look throughout.Next choose a page template. iWeb features ready-made templates for welcome, about me, photo album, movie, blog and podcast pages. Create as many pages as you like.Then its time to customise your layout with easy-to-use iWeb tools. Drag in photos or movies or type text into placeholders. Resize and rotate photos. Create overlays. Theres no coding required. No complicated design programs to buy. No obstacles between you and a great-looking website.Customise Your Site Bring in your photos, movies and music.You keep photos in iPhoto. You edit movies in iMovie. You create songs in GarageBand. When its time to share those photos, movies and songs online, iWeb 09 is a great place to start.Just click the Media button to open the iLife Media Browser: a list of all the audio, photos and video on your Mac. Find what you want to share and drag it onto your site.If youre a photographer, youll love how easy it is to publish your photos with iWeb. Drag and drop photos, albums or even movie clips into photo grids. iWeb also includes My Albums pages that collect all your photo albums on a single page so theyre easy to share and to browse.Add Widgets Drop in web widgets that update automatically.Create a site thats fun to visit by adding a few interactive widgets. iWeb 09 makes it drag-and-drop easy to add RSS feeds, iSight photos and videos, a countdown timer, YouTube videos, HTML snippets and other dynamic features. The iWeb Widget Browser puts every widget within reach. All you do is drop the widget you want anywhere on your page.Manage and Publish Manage multiple sites and publish via MobileMe or FTP.Publish your websites the way you want, wherever you want. iWeb 09 makes it easy. It takes just a few clicks to publish your site to MobileMe or any other hosting service via FTP.iWeb uses your MobileMe account information from System Preferences to publish the site. Rather use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to publish to a different hosting service? With the built-in FTP support in iWeb, you can do that, too.Manage multiple websites in iWeb with ease. Use the iWeb site organiser to reorganise, rename or delete individual pages or entire websites. iWeb creates navigation menus for each site. And you can publish one site at a time either to MobileMe or to another hosting service via FTP.Notify Facebook Let Facebook friends know when you update your site.iWeb 09 uploads only your changes when you publish, so youll enjoy quick site updates. iWeb will even notify your Facebook friends when you update your site. Simply link any iWeb site to your Facebook account. Following an update, iWeb adds the changes to your profile, alerting your friends and providing them with a handy link.
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(+) Great user interface, fantastic templates, nice speed bumps, (-) Still not as robust as Microsoft Office, some slowdowns when working on very large files
Advantages: Facial recognition, Places, precision editor, iweb ftp built in Disadvantages: not enough slideshow themes in iPhoto, faces can be a bit awkward at times
...entire process follows the golden Apple rule- sounds complicated, turns out it’s not. As with all new technology, it is not foolproof and it may occasionally suggest that this person is Dave, when it is really Liz, but it is easily rectified by telling iPhoto (by simply double clicking the picture) that it is not who it thinks it is. Interestingly, iPhoto seems to get smarter as you do this and far fewer mistakes are made. Let me put this feature ... ...was a beautifully designed mess. Apple decided that they would revamp the formula and create an easy to use video editor- aimed primarily at the consumer market. In the process, many nifty and more advanced features were lost and the prosumer and professional market needed to look elsewhere; frustrating for many including myself. iMovie 09 sets out to rectify all that by introducing the new, ‘precision-editor mode’ making it easy to fine tune every ... more
iLife is comprised of five programs- built exclusively for the Mac: iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, iWeb, iDVD. Seeing as we are dealing a multitude of programs, it would make sense to go through the major areas of improvement- and maybe in order of when they appeared in Schiller’s keynote.
---iPhoto 09---
iPhoto 09 now introduces ‘Faces’, allowing you to organise photos by using face recognition technology. Simply put, iPhoto 09 find faces of people in your photo library and ask you to label them. When you label a face once, iPhoto will once again search through your entire library and create a new photo album consisting only of that person you labelled. I can quite safely say, this feature worked brilliantly- straight out of the box. The entire process follows the golden Apple rule- sounds complicated, turns out it’s not. As with all new technology, it is not foolproof and it may occasionally suggest that this person is Dave, when it is really Liz, but it is easily rectified by telling iPhoto (by simply double clicking the picture) that it is not who it thinks it is. Interestingly, iPhoto seems to get smarter as you do this and far fewer mistakes are made. Let me put this feature into context for you; say you have just had a party and you now have a large collection of photos of various different people. You just want to see pictures of your Dad, and assuming you have previously ‘labelled’ his face with iPhoto 09, you simply click on the Faces tab on the left hand column and select the album named ‘Dad’, hey presto! You will see every picture that includes Dad. This makes it incredibly easy to find photos of people in your library without having to trudge through the many ‘events’.
If Faces doesn’t seem worth your while, then perhaps ‘Places’ would be. Places, as the name suggests, allows you to organise photos by place. This uses geo-tagging’ to find out where a photo was taken. Geo-tagging, is the process where a camera with a GPS receiver records its exact co-ordinates on Earth when it takes a picture. The program can now read these ‘geo-tags’ assigned to each picture and on a map place a pin where the photo was shot. This means that searching pictures becomes even easier as you can search your photos by country, city or even road. This facility then branches off into creating animated travel maps, dynamically showing your journey from start to finish. Couple these brilliant new organisational features with Flickr and Facebook (the most popular social networking sites) integration- iPhoto will synchronise any changes made to a photo online back to your library. However, it is not all good news! Performance wise, if your library of photos is pushing the 3000 mark, then you are going to see minor, but reasonably frequent slow downs. This is really down to Apple’s method of organising the photos, placing them into far too many directories and sub-directories than is necessary. There is certainly enough here to warrant the upgrade, but let’s look at the other main changes in the suite.
iMovie 09
If I am frank, iMovie 08 was a beautifully designed mess. Apple decided that they would revamp the formula and create an easy to use video editor- aimed primarily at the consumer market. In the process, many nifty and more advanced features were lost and the prosumer and professional market needed to look elsewhere; frustrating for many including myself. iMovie 09 sets out to rectify all that by introducing the new, ‘precision-editor mode’ making it easy to fine tune every edit you make to your video clips, easily. You can edit video and audio tracks separately, allowing you to use audio tracks from different video clips, giving you far more control over your edits than was previously possible with iMovie. Another is the video stabilisation. This is an area we haven’t seen any real development in and it pleases me to say that videos you once thought were useless due to shake can now be amended in an easy, albeit time consuming process.
Garageband 09
Garageband is one of the most versatile and easy to use audio recording and editing programs. Garageband 09’s most notable feature is its new ‘Learn to Play’. These are interactive instrumental lessons which, as the name suggests, teach you how to play the piano or the guitar. The lessons themselves work relatively well; the screen is spilt in two, the top half shows your tutor recorded in HD (High Definition) video, and the bottom half depicts a birds eye view of a guitar or piano, with the necessary keys highlighting when you need to play them. The problem I had with this was the fact that my piano is nowhere near my computer, so unless you are running this on a MacBook, or your instrument can be played near your computer, you are certainly not going to be enjoying this feature. In addition to these beginner lessons, Apple has also included lessons by artists such as Fall Out Boy, Sting, One Republic. But unless you are into the American no. 1’s, you are going to have to have your fingers crossed for some top British bands. Artist lessons are priced at $4.99 each, so around £3.70 here in the UK. Considering the fact that a real music lesson is £11+, if budding musicians are on a tight budget, this is really quite a cost-effective solution.
In addition, Apple has added some new sound effects to their already gargantuan library and have tweaked the coding so performance is increased. All in all, an upgrade that really requires time to truly evaluate its worth.
iWeb 09
The last of the upgrades, iWeb 09 introduces some slick new features to improve its usability. Users of iWeb know that it truly is the easiest way to create a professional looking website without any knowledge of html code whatsoever. Iweb now allows you to upload your site through ftp (file transfer protocol), right inside of iWeb- fantastic news for anyone who does not pay the £58 a year to have a MobileMe subscription. Throw into the mix: new templates, new widgets and Facebook integration- similar to that features in iPhoto, you have an upgrade just about warranting a release. It really depends on how much you use iWeb.
So, overall..
iLife 09 will be priced as follows: the single user license will be priced at £69, and the five user, family pack at £85 and of course, it is free with every new Mac purchased after iLife 09’s release. It is also very important to note that this upgrade requires the latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.5.6, i.e. Leopard, which can be bought on its own for £83, but is available along with iLife 09 and iWork 09 (Apple’s equivalent of Microsoft Office) in a Mac Box Set, all for just £149 saving you 40%. So as usual, the pricing is very fair, and even quite cheap considering its competitors, but should you upgrade? Absolutely. iPhoto’s new places and faces, iMovie’s new precision editing and the learn to play features in Garageband all fully warrant the upgrade. The sharp witted among you will have noticed that iDVD has not been updated- possible inclination that Apple is going to ditch optical media? (CDs and DVDs). Perhaps. But that’s for another time.
To those who, will, want to and do own a Mac, I give you the thumbs up for iLife 09.