Like many of its products, Apple recently updated its iLife software. If you already use iLife, you’ve likely seen the little pop-ups announcing the arrival of iLife ‘08 and suggesting that you upgrade. I survived over a year of iLife ‘06 pop-ups and a few ’08s before finally giving in…

Mac users, is the latest version of iLife right for you?

Whether or not you should upgrade really depends on what iLife applications you rely on most. Personally, I use iPhoto all the time (far more than Adobe Bridge) for management of my images, so I upgraded in order to take advantage of its new organizational features. The concept of organizing by “rolls” (which only made a little bit of sense” is gone, making way for organization by “events.” Let’s say you took 10 pictures of your cat and 20 pictures from the state fair, and imported all these into iPhoto. These come in as a single Event, but are easily split into two independent events—just select the images of your cat (or of the fair), click Split, and it’s done.

If you organize your images for design, this is a really useful tool, keeping photos for every project in a separate Event. When you’re done with some projects, merge their Events to tuck them away all together.

Onward to other items in the iLife ‘08 package… iWeb was new to the iLife ‘06 package, and since I skipped that upgrade, it’s totally new to me. What I expected was a dinky little web design app, similar to FrontPage at best, and I was surprised to find some good tools here. iWeb comes with a huge number of actually well-designed templates you can use to design a personal site complete with photo albums, blogs, and podcasts. Needless to say, you wouldn’t use this to design a client site, but it’s great for next time Aunt Sue or Cousin Mavis bugs you to make them a website. Simple tools make it easy to add text, images, and media, and you can even pop in snippets of HTML code if you’re so inclined.

Tons of templates, and pages within them, offer lots of design options for a quick site.

GarageBand and iDVD don’t see enormous changes in the ‘08 update, and more than a few users are cranky about a lack of high definition DVD burning options). But I really love the new “Magic GarageBand” feature that presents all of your instruments as a band on a virtual stage, and the new animated themes in iDVD are sure to be crowd pleasers as well.

Finally, that leaves iMovie. The one reason many iLife users simply won’t upgrade to ‘08. Apple did something here that software developers rarely do: They took away major features, and essentially dropped the old iMovie in favor of a brand new program. iMovie previously contained lots of video and audio effects as well as precision timeline and audio editing features. All this is gone in favor of a streamlined product made for quick movie creation (perhaps to compete less with Apple’s own Final Cut products?). In response to the uproar, iMovie ‘08 users can still access a download of the “old” application on the Apple site.

There’s little question that iLife ‘08 is an inessential upgrade overall, but once you get around to it, you’ll have fun with the new features and maybe discover some new ways to get creative and save time.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.