Apple Boosts Its Free Software Offering
Along with the updated iMac announced yesterday, Apple unveiled the latest edition of iLife, the company's killer suite of multimedia programs that comes free with every new Mac.
iLife '08's biggest change comes from iMovie, Apple's consumer-level video editing app. iMovie has been completely replaced with a new application, still called iMovie for the sake of consistency. iMovie now operates more like the popular photo sharing app iPhoto, which also received an update. You can now edit your movies, add effects -- all from the same interface you use to watch, browse, and share them.
The program takes input from just about any video source you can think of, and when you're done, it's completely painless to create a version tailored for iTunes, your iPod, your iPhone, Apple TV or to just upload to your .mac Web album or YouTube. Apple claims the program will allow you to create, edit and share HD video in less than 20 minutes. The partner program iDVD, for burning your cinematic creations, has also received a minor update adding new themes and, according to Apple, "really high production values."
The iPhoto application received a much more minor upgrade, adding more tightly integrated sharing with the .mac Web albums and a feature called "Events" that automatically creates photo albums based on the date the photographs were taken. Events can be easily combined and split, in case you go to a multi day event or more than one event in a day. You can also hide photos based on ratings, so that even though all 200 pictures from Aunt Milly's 60th birthday party are in the album, you can choose to display as few as you want.
The Web page creation program, iWeb, gets a healthy dose of upgrades as well. Now, widgets such as Google Maps are supported. In addition, you'll now find themes to alter the appearance of your pages, support for personal Web site domain names (i.e., www.some-dude.com) and simple index page creation for easy navigation of your content. iWeb was easy to use before, but now it might actually be useful.
Apple's melody maker, Garage Band, gets the somewhat perplexing Magic Garage Band update that lets you alter and jam along with prerecorded, genre-specific tracks: "blues, rock, jazz, country, reggae, funk, latin, another rock style, and slow blues." Apparently, electronic music is not worth jamming with.
As always, iLife is packaged for free with every new Mac, and costs only $79 for everything if you're running an old Mac, but want to enjoy these excellent updates.
From Engadget
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