Apple has released the newest suite of media applications for youe Mac, the iLife bundle which includes iMovie - the movie editing application, iPhoto - the photo management application, GarageBand - the music and podcast creation application, iDVD - the DVD authoring application and finally, iWeb - the web site creation application.

Of the group iMovie stood out as the best of the group. Apple has written this from the ground up so it's a brand new application. They've also completely re-thought how movie editing should work. The first thing you will notice is the new interface, which is composed of and iTunes like interface where you have your sources on the left, and your working are in the center. Another thing you may notice is there is no timeline! And once you see how you edit - you won't need it. Apple has figured most users want to quickly edit roughly 30 minutes of video into a 5 minute clip which you'd want to share with others in some fashion which iMovie is setup to easily upload to your .Mac account or youTube.


Another area iMovie has changed is reviewing your movies. Previously you'd have to double-click a clip and review it, now all you do is mouse-over any part of your movie and it will begin playing, a technique known as 'skimming'. Editing your movies is completely new here too- no more clicking on clips to review them, trim to this spot, then copy; paste; delete non-sense. Instead, just drag over an area in a clip, then add that portion to your movie. It's that easy. Lastly iMovie is a project manager, which means all of your projects are held in a single window. Like iTunes and iPhoto, import your movie clips here for permanent storage. Your movies are copied to the iMovie Events folder in your Movies folder. Because the latest iMovie has be re-written, previous plug-ins and extensions will not work, in fact because this version of iMovie has rethought what iMovies are and where they are viewed, there aren't even themes available, just your media browser and a handful of transitions. If you need some of these features - keep iMovie '06 on hand which is left behind by default.

I personally am happy with this new version though much talk lately has been against this new app because of how much has been left out. David Pogue has said it's been a huge step back, and I agree with his argument, but I do like the new direction. I suppose with a brand new application there will be some give and take and at some point we should be in a similar point. Hopefully at leas with iMovie '09.


iPhoto is the second application that's gotten a nice upgrade. The major feature is Events, which is essentially an intelligent method of grouping your photos. When you import photos, iPhoto creates an event(s) and hopefully logically breaks down your images into proper groups. So far for me it seems the events are simply time based. I was doing a photo shoot for myself then imported the pictures into iPhoto. Then went back and resumed to take more photos, and returned to import the newer photos - iPhoto created two events from those two sessions but probably should have been one event. But Events does making your images easier to manage, since it's super easy to split or merge events together with drag and drop. iPhoto also uses the same skimming feature iMovie has, just mouseover any event and view what images are in that grouping. Beautifully executed and a nice new UI feature.

If you have a .Mac account, you now have access to a new online gallery. Simply select an event group or a series of photos and click the Web Gallery button and voom! It's on the web. The new gallery is no lame picture show either, this is a fully ajaxified online experience. Apple has developed a flexible gallery which you can view in a number of modes like CoverFlow and Mosaic. The presentation beautiful and makes me feel like I'm in iPhoto. There are some other interesting features here, like allowing anyone to download an image, upload an image to your gallery, subscribe via RSS and tell a friend. The gallery does require pretty intensive processing power, so a slow system would really run horribly and the experience would be completely lost. That's a bit unfortunate because its likely anyone you know isn't running the latest and greatest of hardware.

The rest of the iApps I haven't had much of a chance to really get into, but I suppose I will at some point. iWeb seems a bit more promising with it's Google integration and HTML snippets. GarageBand I just haven't had the need for and iDVD, if all they did was make it faster and usable it's a good upgrade.

Tags: iMovie, iPhoto

Last Friday was iPhone day across the nation, Apple was launching their biggest product in their company's history - a new cell phone. For years there were rumors about "What if Apple designed a phone, what what it look like, and what would it do?", we found out a lot 6 months ago, but starting last Friday we know. It is the kind of phone I would easily trade any of mine in for and have.

Over at my development project blog I wrote a pretty detailed review of my thoughts on the iPhone. Check it out out there.

Tags: iPhone, Apple

Apple released a new version of Safari today at the Developer Convemtion, well sort of, it's really a public beta release, so it's not an official version yet. If you downloaded it and kept using it as you had previously you'd almost think it was the same. And for the most part it is. Actually, one of the most exciting things about this release is not a new feature at all but a version that can run on Windows XP/Vista. Why is this exciting for a Mac user? Well for a few reasons I can think of.

• Windows users can once again finally see their websites look awesome. Every-time I look at aliased fonts in IE & FF on Windows, my body shudders, I can't explain it.
• Web Developers can more accurately develop on a single platform for all browsers (even though that platform is Windows)
• With Safari on Windows, we should see more website supported in Safari rather than 'Coming Soon' or your browser is unsupported messages.
• This should once again push MS to have better CSS support. Some of the coolest CSS features work awesome in Safari, lets start seeing in all browsers already.
• A larger Safari base (which in turn shrinks the IE user base). What's better than seeing Windows users love Apple software?

While these are just great reasons for Safari on Windows, there are actual feature in this new version of Safari. Simple but cool and interesting.

Resizable Textarea form elements

Just click and drag the lower right corner 'grabbers' and stretch. Kind of cool, there are so many times I've wished I could do something like this. Only drawback is it can break your layout, and since this is proprietary to Safari, will you have to use proprietary markup to control it? Hope they don't go there.

Awesome Find Feature

Who'd-a-thunk the Find feature would be so cool? I love it. Try it out now!


Default RSS reader. I'm not totally sure if this is new, but in the preferences window, you can choose a reader for RSS feeds to load into.

If you use 1PassWord, it will not work in Safari 3, which I am sure the developer knows by now, an error lets you know that it's not going to load. Also this version of Safari breaks MailPlane, but there is a workaround for now which to enable Rich-Text Editing in the advanced preferences.

So have you found anything else new? Let me know.

Tags: browser, Internet, software

Ecto 3 is on it's way and it's looking pretty nice. A screen has been posted on their site today shows off its new interface which has a nice updated Mac interface. Ecto 3 is being rewritten completely with full plug-in support for the major blogs. It looks as though there will be some iLife integration from the looks of the image. Looking forward to the new release being my blog app of choice.

Tags: ecto, blog

I tried downloading HandBrake 0.8.5 beta this week but had issues with the file. The dmg file downloaded without issue, it was when I tried mounting it I received an error claiming there was nothing to mount. Anyone having issues here? I've tried on an MacBook Pro and G5 tower both with the same results.

Tags: dvd, software

It's been just about a week now and everyone has heard about Apple offering DRM-Free music from iTunes. As usual there are people who love it, and those who still have something to gripe over. First - this is going to be a great change in how media is sold, once Apple shows how well DRM-Free music is selling the other labels will be on board in no time. Along with Amazon & Microsoft selling DRM-Free music, sales will boom for the industry and then maybe we can put this whole DRM thing to bed.

Apple has integrated a pseudo service into iTunes called 'iTunes Plus', which offers higher quality non-drm music files for only $1.29 or if you already purchased the song, it's just .30 cents more. It's actually a pretty good deal. Better quality, freedom of usage - it's what we all wanted! The people have spoke, and the industry actually listened - this is unprecedented!

Surely there is something wrong here though, it can't be as good as it sounds, what's the catch?

This depends on who you talk to. If you ask me, I say we've reached the ultimate compromise. It seems even though the files can be played on any device (provided it supports AAC format), the iTunes files carries your account information including your name, email and other data about you. People seem to be up in arms over this 'privacy' issue. A number of articles being written that are either criticizing Apple and saying iTunes Plus isn't all what it should be and be careful because you can be tracked. Are users hoping they could post their music back up on Napster again? Why even bother getting upset over this? This is equivalent of going to a retail store and the cashier asking you for your address at checkout. It's so they know where their users are coming from. In this case, where their users are going to - only in the event they have to. What do you think about it?

Tags: music, drm, iTunes

Though the version number only jumps .1 to 3.6, there are many improvements here and unfortunately an upgrade cost of $25. Much of the changes are small interface tweaks, such as there is no long a code vide tab in the main window which is good and bad - yes its great to view the code but you couldn't edit in there so it had its usefulness but there are also some great new features which I will give an overview here.

If you write a blog, as I do, using Rapid Weaver you'll notice there isn't a drop menu of you categories any long, instead an empty text field for you to enter. It's a smart field so if you have categories setup, the auto complete helps you out. This method is pretty cool and it also allows you to file this into multiple categories. A new feature is tags, you can now tag your blog with keywords, works exactly the same as the categories. Both tags and categories are saved in the setup dialog, so you can go ahead and make your modifications there.

A brand new Flash Slideshow is now included with new transitions, Ken Burns effects and Flickr support via RSS feed. This looks like a pretty nice looking slideshow, just remember to get the latest JavaScript file if you are using a custom template.

A huge and exciting edition to RW are snippets which are reusable chunks of code that are saved by name. This could make managing the sidebar easier from page to page, or if you have some dynamic code you'd like to maintain a little easier.

Lists are easy to make now with the List feature. Select a bunch of lines and choose Format->List and a dialog asking what kind of list to make, choose one and click OK. If you aren't fluent in HTML or CSS, I must say the menu is a bit archaic looking.

A basic list will look like:

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3
• Item 4

Only 1 issue I wish they'd make a bid easier is linking an thumbnail to a larger version, this should be built in, but you still have to manually do a lot of work to do this. Please fix this. RapidWeaver costs $49 for a single license, and $25 to upgrade and is a great tool for building small to medium websites quickly.

Tags: web, development, design