For many Mac users, iLife is all the software they’ll ever need. By including iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, iWeb and iDVD with every new Mac, Apple provides users with an “out of the box” experience unrivaled by any computer manufacturer. In fact, most other computer companies load their machines with stripped-down versions of various and sundry software titles in an attempt to ship something useful to their customers. In reality, most of these software titles are so crippled or annoy users with upgrade “nag screens” to the extent they’ve earned the nickname “crapplications”. The real irony: companies like Sony and HP charge you extra (as much as $50) to ship your new computer without these programs. What’s really happening? Software companies are paying computer manufacturers to install their crapplications, hoping users will buy upgrades from them. PC manufacturers can claim they provide all this great functionality and crapplication providers get to pitch to you every time you launch their product.
Apple, on the other hand, ships every computer they sell with the ability to manipulate digital photos, create professional-looking videos, record music and podcasts, create websites and make complete DVDs and you’ll never see an upgrade “nag screen”. iLife is a collection of complete, polished software and one of the best values I’ve ever seen.
Last week, Apple released their latest version of iLife with big upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band. I just received mine on Tuesday so I haven’t yet had the opportunity to try all the new features, so this isn’t a complete review. I have tried the new iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band and I have to say I’m impressed.
iPhoto has added a new fullscreen mode, great new slideshows and the ability to upload your photos to Facebook with a single click. If you like to create greeting cards and books with your photos there are some beautiful new offerings including the ability to create professional looking “letterpress” cards. That’s the printing process that embosses images onto high quality paper giving them a three dimensional look. You create these cards or books using iPhoto, send the file to Apple and they print them for you for a nominal fee. Apple’s been doing this for years, but some of the new designs included with the new iPhoto are truly stunning.
iMovie gets a significant upgrade with the addition of a “Trailers” feature to create professional looking movie trailers, the ability to edit audio tracks in your movies and facial recognition which, like the same feature in iPhoto, lets you easily find video of people you’ve defined by searching for their face. Like iPhoto, I’m flabbergasted by how accurate this feature is.
Garage band also gets some great new features. “Flextime” lets you quickly correct portions of a track and fix the beat timing when it’s out of sync with the rest of the song. “Groove Matching” lets you sync every track of a song by matching them all to a single track of your choosing. There’s also new guitar amps and effects and Apple has added lots of new basic music lessons for piano and guitar. Included within every lesson is the new “How Did I Play?” feature that compares your playing to the correct score and highlights your mistakes.
iWeb and iDVD are basically unchanged. Some are surprised that Apple still includes iDVD at all, considering their shifting philosophy toward downloadable and streaming content. This may be the last version of iLife to include it.
If you only need a single copy, iLife is just $49. For people with only one Mac, this is a good value. If however, you own two or more, the $79 “Family Pack” of five licenses is an even better deal. For families like mine with five Macs (two for me and one for each of my three daughters), it is a real steal! Getting all the capabilities of iLife for less than $16 per machine seems almost ludicrous. I’d be an idiot if I didn’t take advantage of pricing like that.
With iPhones, iPods and iPads getting all the attention of late, some of us Mac faithful were starting to get a little worried Apple might be ignoring us. The introduction of two new MacBook Air models, this iLife release and the news of next summer’s release of OS X “Lion” puts that fear to rest quite nicely.