iLife '08 - First Impressions

I've gotten around to installing iLife '08 and so far, I'm really happy. It seems that Apple have finally made an effort to make their flagship multimedia applications useful to their users, and with a half decent iDisk capacity, I feel I can finally make some use of the tool.

I'm not into making music, that't not my bag. I listen to music, so GarageBand doesn't quite float my boat. I gave it a shot and tried the whole Magic thing and it was fun, but since I'm as musical as a testicle, it wasn't going to go very far.

As far as video is concerned, a couple of YouTube videos is all I've ever done so I've not yet got hold of the iMove thing. What I have been digging though is the iPhoto and iWeb enhancements.

The whole iPhoto image manipulation thing has changed and the UI is a little clunky in one or two areas (for example, how exactly do I save changes?) but there facilities and functionality has been improved vastly, from controls for shading and lighting to a totally excellent Event-based organisation system for your photos.

Cool! Now you have albums, tags and events by which you can make sense of your photographs. Can't go wrong.

iWeb has finally got all the stuff it should have had in the first place, including a facility for inserting HTML code. What this means to me is that I can now use an iFrame to show my Blogger blog (this one) in an iWeb page.

I can add some really, really cool photo albums direct from iPhoto using the Photo Gallery which means I don't even have to start up iPhoto to update the photo galleries.

You think that's cool? Wait until you hear this one; The photo gallery is a cross-platform web-based application that has optional password protection. It shows your galleries using a very similar interface to iPhoto (you have to see the image scrolling on the album icon!) allowing you to share selected albums with everyone or specific individuals. Not only that, if you have the right permissions, you can add to that album, from wherever you are, from whatever platform you're using, without having to start up iPhoto, iWeb or iAnything! How insanely cool is that!?

You can see my photo gallery either by clicking on Photography on my main website (www.rcopeh.com) or you can go to http://gallery.mac.com/rcopeh where you can see the gallery of albums and choose which album you want to view.

I really am well happy with the iLife '08 suite and to think that you get all that software (music making, video making, DVD making, photo albums, web page making) for only £55 is breathtaking. And don't even get me started on iWork which is the same price and offers some staggering functionality with the new Numbers application. These may be my first impressions of iLife '08 and I'm sure that I'm going to find some frustrating 'feature' or annoyance but hey, so far, this stuff is fantastic and I'm loving what it can let me do with minimum effort and maximum creativity.

Dot Mac Looks A Bit More Useful

Thanks to recent announcements from Apple, their .Mac service looks like it could actually be useful by the end of the week!

Don't get me wrong, you still don't get your money's worth, IMHO, but I can now use it for stuff which actually means something. Whereas in the past all I could put on there were some token websites and a temporary store for e-mail, I can now use that Backup software and create an online backup of my stuff.

Going from 1Gb to 10Gb is a great thing, though I never like to see transfer limits. I guess I'll have to live with that and be confident that I'm nowhere near likely to use up my current transfer limit, let alone the new one.

You may be asking why I signed up for it in the first place if I'm so down on the value it offers, and to that I can only say convenience. I have family down the motorway who use an Apple Mac (mini) and it helps to be able to have everything in one place for management. Plus, iWeb does offer some cool stuff (which I've been able to to put to use here). Worth the money? Maybe not, but it's Ok and I live in the hope that more improvements are on their way.

Among the other announcements, I am kind of excited about the iLife '08 suite and iWork '08 looks pretty nice too. I like the look and feel of Apple products in the way it delivers useful functionality in an interface that's like a house where you feel at home the moment you walk through the door. In contrast, Windows makes me feel like someone who's walking into a house where there's a big dog barking and the sofas are impractically big, pretty but big (you ever sat on one of those bigass sofas where you could easily fall between the cushions and find an entire universe of new life forms and civilisations?)

What I really looking forward to, however, is Leopard. I'm already saving my pretty scarce pennies to get me a copy when it comes out.