CUPERTINO, California—January 26, 2009—Apple® today announced that iLife® ’09 will be available tomorrow, January 27, and features major upgrades to iPhoto®, iMovie® and GarageBand®, with breakthrough new ways to organize and manage photos, create movies and learn to play music. iLife ’09 is included with every new Mac® and is available as a $79 upgrade for existing users through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

For the complete press release read it here.

*Edit: Thanks to Bourne for pointing out the error on the title

Post from: EveryJoe

iLife 09 to Ship On Jan 27th

I was following the keynote last night via Gizmodo and MacRumors (before the site was hacked). I was only getting the text update and the images provided by Gizmodo. At that time I was a bit underwhelmed. This morning though when I got up, I watched the streaming video of the keynote. I must say that my opinion changed.

Phil Schiller is no Steve Jobs but I think he did ok. Not spectacular but I wasn’t bored to death. That had a lot to do with the products that they presented.

The heart of the keynote was the software. iLife 09 and iWork 09 in particular. I must say, from the keynote they did a wonderful job. I love how Apple uses technology that’s already available but pieces it together in a way that makes you just say, wow!

iPhoto’s new features includes Faces, a facial recognition algorithm that allows you to tag people in your photos and from that it will look at your other photos and look for the people you’ve already tagged and ask you to confirm if that’s indeed them. If it is, it can group photos according to the person.

Another feature is Places which uses geotagging to group photos according to where you took them.

iMovie 09 also sports wonderful new features.

iWork 09 is also updated. Pages haas been given a new full screen feature. This has been done before by other software but Apple recognized it’s usefulness and adapted it as well.

Numbers got updates as well and improved sorting and other features to make using spreadsheets better.

Keynote got some new transitions, new ways to build slide animations as well as a new remote application for the iPod Touch and the iPhone that will allow you to control your presentations via your device.

So the software was the focus this year and it’s really great once I saw it. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

The third thing they talked about was the new 17″ MacBook Pro sporting the new unibody design. What makes this baby standout is the fact that it doesn’t have the removable battery. Instead it has a new built-in battery which is specially designed for the MacBook Pro. Apple says because of this, it has been able to design a battery that will last 8 hours on a single charge and can be charged for 1000 times. This battery has a typical life span of 5 years. More than double the industry standard.

Another option for the 17 is a $50 anti-glare option. This is a feature that most pros have been clamoring for.

Apple’s “One More Thing” for this keynote is the announcement that iTunes is going DRM free. Yahoo! It is abandoning the single pricing scheme though. Apple will be pricing songs in three price points. 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29.

Apple is also opening up it’s iTunes Store to 3G network. A feature previously unavailable. iPhone users can now access the same store via 3G. Allowing users to download songs wherever and whenever.

However in my opinion the biggest show stopper of the keynote was neither software or hardware. It was Tony Bennett. A fitting closer to a great MacWorld tradition.

All in all it was a good keynote. Not great. But it was ok enough. I will surely miss MacWorld Keynotes, a ritual of mine for the past several years.

Post from: EveryJoe

MacWorld 09

iTunes was fairly easy. You change the iTunes Music Folder location under the Advanced tab in preferences. Click consolidate library under the Advanced menu and everything copies over. (Keep in mind, this copies, not moves, and you’ll need to delete the old copy if conserving space is your goal.)

iPhoto turned out to be even easier, but I was thinking that Apple products would behave roughly the same, but couldn’t find anywhere in the preferences that indicated location. But all you actually need to do is move your folder with iPhoto closed, then reopen iPhoto. iPhoto will ask you where your folder is. Point to the new one and your set.

Post from: EveryJoe

Spreading Out Your Mac to an External Hard Drive

Apple released its much awaited upgrade to the iLife Suite. They chose to skip one year because of the delay so from iLife 06 it now jumps to 08. Does features jump that far ahead as well given the delay? Well for most of the apps yes. But according to David Pogue, iMovie is more of a leap backwards.

I haven’t had a chance to try the new iLife 08. I still have to get my hands on a copy but from what I’ve heard and read, iMovie well pretty much sucks. Sure, there are some good things about it but a lot of good things found in the previous iMovie were also scrapped. Features such as the timeline, ability to edit sound, etc..

So why Apple?!? Why did you downgrade instead of upgrade…

As always, David Pogue writes about iMovie in an entertaining yet insightful way. As with his other articles. Read on.

Post from: EveryJoe

David’s Take on iMovie 08

iLife 08
iPhoto has received a significant upgrade for this version. Apple has introduced “events” based way of sorting out your photos. You also now have the option to hide photos that you probably don’t like as much to clutter your photo library but don’t hate enough to delete. You can choose to hide these photos to give your library a more streamlined look. iPhoto also lets you “skim” through your photos. It’s hard to explain what it is here. You’ll just have to go view the demo at the Apple web site.

iMovie has been rebuilt from the ground up. Steve Jobs says that the new iMovie will allow you to create a decent home movie in 30 mins. One of the notable features of the new iMovie is the ability to share and publish your videos to YouTube. There’s a one click button that allows you to encode and send your video to YouTube.

iWork 08
This version of the software suite is definitely exciting. Keynote and Pages receive significant upgrades. For pages, the distinction between word processing and page layout is much much clearer. You can select what you want to do and it’s clear. Keynote gets new transitions, text effects, point-to-point animation and a whole lot of other new things.

The biggest thing to come to iWork 08 is the new application called Numbers. It’s spreadsheet for the rest of us. I was floored on how Apple made doing spreadsheets so easy and fun. What I love about Numbers is the ability to move around your tables in the page without affecting formulas, calculations, etc. You also have a fit to page option to scale your work to fit either one page or how many pages you want it to fit. Numbers is awesome. Oh, did I say that it also imports and exports Excel compatible files. Although some say not all Excel files can be imported.

There’s a trial for iWork 08. Check it out and see if it’s good enough for you. The license is $79. Definitely cheaper than MS Office.

Before I go here are some links to help you explore these two babies.

1. iLife 08 press release
2. iWork 08 press release
3. iLife 08 product section
4. iWork 08 product section
5. iLife 08 Tutorials
6. iWork 08 Tutorials

Post from: EveryJoe

Apple Releases iLife and iWork 08