iLove iLife '08

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