With each new Mac sold on the market coming with the excellent iLife, there’s little doubt as to what kind of stock Apple is putting on their excellent app suite as a solid incentive to upgrade. It’s no surprise, either, given the depth of thought Apple seems to have given to the way people use their digital media and how much of that is reflected on changes in this latest iteration.
All five apps in the suite – iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand and iWeb – feature amazing creativity that bring multimedia creation and enjoyment to a level that you won’t exactly find in a single place so easily.
iPhoto ’09, for instance, features two key updates that just made organizing an ever-growing image library so much easier than ever. First, instead of having to tag each photo with keywords, you can train the application to recognize faces in each scene and automatically tag it accordingly. While the system is not perfect, it does work a lot of the time (after training) and creates a really interesting way to organize photos that we’ve never seen before. Second key update to iPhoto is the Places feature, which adds Picasa-like mapping to geotagged photos. Other changes include upgrade to the app’s photo-editing capabilities, online uploading improvements and stunning slideshow effects.
iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand still feature the same easy editing competence we’ve come to familiarize with. iMovie ’09, in particular, offer new attractive options like PIP and screen-color effects, along with the much-touted video stabilization, which lived up to every bit of the hype, steadying wobbly shots like it was nobody’s business. iWeb, on the other hand, continues to make site publishing the same widget-based drag-and-drop affair that has made it an easy, albeit, largely unpopular tool.
If you’re planning to get a new Apple machine, you can enjoy iLife ’09 in all its glory for free, which we’re almost certain will be winning a ton of awards based on the iPhoto changes alone. Otherwise, the app is a great buy for $79 – one that you should have, no questions asked.
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