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 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’.

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 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.

iWeb 09

So, overall..