Andy's Blog

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.

Technorati Tags: Apple, MWSF, iLife

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