Apple iLife 09

...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.  

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