January 10, 2006

iLife '06

iPhoto:
  • Paid a lot of attention to performance -- Steve says it is much faster.
  • Up to 250,000 photos
  • full screen editing (looks very nice). Can do compares, editing tools hide/show
  • One-click effects (like Photo Booth)
  • New cards, calendars, and dramatically better books (higher quality printing). Can make own calendars. And cards (including postcards).
  • Photocasting - podcasting for photos. !??!?! Publish/subscribe for photo albums over the Internet? Done through .Mac -- when you photocast an album, it will automatically be uploaded to .Mac in the background. Any changes will automatically be sync'd to .Mac. When you subscribe to photocast, you get a special album in your source list. This source is automatically updated. "Just like magic". Looks pretty cool, but only for all-Mac people. whoa! They use RSS to subscribe -- it is the industry standard. So you only need mac + iPhoto + .Mac to publish, but anyone can subscribe.
  • Steve is doing the demo now -- it looks nice and snappy, on what appears to be a 20" iMac.
  • iPhoto 6 looks a lot like the new iTunes -- no borders on sides, brushed metal borders on top/bottom.
  • Calendar facility has integration with iCal -- so you can make a calendar that already has your events on it.
iMovie:
  • Adding animated themes - themes with a designated area to drop photos or movies. Looks like distilled version of motion?
  • more than one open project at once
  • export to iPod with one command
  • create video podcasts
iDVD:
  • Widescreen menus (for widescreen TVs)
  • magic iDVD - for doing it fast, when you don't have time to play with it. Can pick a theme, and drop in movies, photos, or whole photo albums, create project, burn DVD. Looks pretty good.
  • Vastly improved slideshows
  • enhanced map view
  • support 3rd party burners
GarageBand:
  • added podcast studio - best tool in world to create podcasts
  • royalty free sound effects and jingles
  • automatic ducking - soundtrack lowers when you talk, and volume comes back up when you stop
  • speech enhancer to fix sound quality of on-computer mic
  • can grab iChat audio sessions, for interviews conducted over iChat, to automatically become a podcast (hot).
  • new Jam Pack - World Music
iWeb:
  • for sharing music, podcasts, blogs, movies, photos with people over the Internet, by making a web page
  • super-easy to use, lets you build beautiful websites
  • Apple-designed templates
  • access to all iLife media
  • photo albums
  • blogs and podcasts
  • one-click publishing to .Mac
  • Photo viewer has some AJAX technology (works in IE, Safari, and Firefox). The AJAX UI is sick. It looks really amazing.
  • Automatically-generate RSS for blogs and podcasts
  • Looks kindof like Pages, but for the web
  • Drop an iTunes playlist in there, and it will automatically make links to all of the songs on iTMS.
I'm super-happy that Apple is embracing blogging, with a tool that can enable people to publish. Anything that makes it easier to blog, or brings more people in to blogging, is a very good thing. They should have had iWeb back when they launched .Mac -- this is what .Mac was built for.

So, how much does it cost? Same price: $79. Available today! $99 family pack. Free on all new macs.

-Andy.

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Posted by andyr at January 10, 2006 9:34 AM
Comments

"Free on all new macs."

Wait a damn minute. Isn't this the kind of behavior that MSFT used with IE, Media Player, etc that earned it an anti-trust reputation and litigation?

I suppose it's predatory pricing when MSFT does it but it's a great deal when apple does it.

Posted by: Mark at January 10, 2006 11:26 AM

Mark,

Check your facts. What was illegal about what MS did is that they *forced* computer makers to make IE and Media Player be both installed and the defaults, if they wanted windows. Computer makers were installing Netscape and Real, but when MS started their predatory practices, those apps got dropped.

What Apple is doing is totally different.

-Andy.

Posted by: Andrew Reitz at January 10, 2006 12:03 PM

The "photocasting" is basically flickr ported to .Mac. Same concept, same everything, in fact I have money on flickr doing a better job than the mac folks. Apple isn't very good at copying stuff (unlike some other people ;D )

Posted by: Rushabh at January 10, 2006 1:39 PM