The new iteration of Apple's iLife product adds a whole host of new features, but is it worth the price? That's what this review aims to look at, the features, the ease of use, and value for money.
Introduction and Installation
The iLife product is not just one application, but five. It contains iPhoto for organising photographs, iMovie for editing digital videos, GarageBand for recording your own music, iDVD for creating DVDs from your movies, and iWeb for creating your own website. Let me start my saying that I do use iPhoto and iMovie occasionally, but have never had reason to use GarageBand and refuse to use iWeb.
The installation is pretty straight forward as you'd expect - it's a Mac, so installation comes easy. One thing worthy of note though is that it requires a minimum of Mac OS X 10.5.6 which at the time I didn't have installed as I've not used my Macbook Pro for a few weeks. Once installation is complete any existing versions will be replaced with the newest one, though I found iMovie HD that I've had installed for the past 3 years was kept, but moved into a "iMovie Previous Version" folder. One thing I was surprised about was when I went into the Apple Store in Leicester's Highcross shopping centre, was that the shop assistant (or whatever Apple like to call them) asked when I bought my Mac so she could figure out whether it was a high enough spec to run the software. I answered with "about 3 years" and she was unsure so she decided to ask "do you think your Mac can run it?". It being the first of the Intel Mac's I was pretty sure at the time that I'd be able to run this with no problems. When I got back to the office I found the minimum spec to be a G4... something that hasn't exactly been available for a while.
GarageBand '09
This is the first time I've really used GarageBand, I opened the previous version at some point but never really used it - it's one of those things I assumed I'd get round to at some point or another. When you start the application up you get a splash screen saying what's new, but unless you tick the box you won't see this again (thankfully). The interface design once you're in is quite nice - you get a list of tasks down one side with the default one being "New Project". I'm going to skip ahead here and goto what is my favourite new feature, "Learn to Play". Just a few short days ago I bought myself a new guitar as I want to learn how to play... knowing that the new GarageBand would be able to get me started. Clicking on "Learn to Play" you get two lessons straight out of the box:
- Piano Lesson 1
- Guitar Lesson 1
So thats a good place to start really, and then when you're ready the next option in the task pane is "Lesson Store" which has a tab for free lessons for both piano and guitar, and an artists tab to get video lessons from recording artists (each video currently priced at £3.95). The lesson's aren't bad either - before I got iLife I'd been using video's off YouTube to learn - but these are better. They start with the absolute basics - holding the guitar, strumming, etc. and then move on to learning chords, riffs, etc.
For "New Projects" you get a choice of:
- Piano
- Electric Guitar
- Voice
- Loops
- Keyboard Collection
- Acoustic Instrument
- Songwriting
- Podcast
- Movie
An interesting bunch of projects there, and the majority of them will give you a typical view of tracks in the song (each track being an instrument) and the settings for it. Each instrument can use one of many "virtual" amps, and can also use a number of pedals. This view is customised slightly in each mode to best suit the type of production you're doing. The final thing worthy of note is how easy it is to export to iTunes as either an album, or a ringtone for your iPhone. Excellent.
iPhoto '09
Previously I've used iPhoto for it's slideshows - just because using a remote control for a slideshow is pretty useful when you've got quite a lot of pictures to go through. When loading the new version up you're presented with a "what's new" screen similar to GarageBand (and the other new applications). If you've used iPhoto before then on it's first run it will also convert existing photo albums to the new version and will then proceed to process all your photographs with it's facial recognition software. This is where I found a slight problem - I closed the application down by accident whilst it was still processing and when it started back up it didn't continue or display what it had found so far. If you're unlucky enough to do the same then your best bet is to find a photograph with a face in it, and then click "Name" - this gives you the chance to name the person in it and it should hopefully show you any others it's found (which it did for me).
The interface has changed a bit, yet it is still recognisable as being iPhoto. The Library section is now divided into Events, Photos, Faces and Places. Clicking on any of these will give you new activities for Keepsakes (produce books, etc.), and uploading to MobileMe, Facebook, Flickr, Email and iWeb. Events is a nice way of organising photos - previously this had to be done by creating albums, but now it will automatically create events based on dates - which you can merge together to show an event spans multiple days. The photos view is pretty much as it was before, but it now has a dark background (presumably ready for the "Marble" interface being introduced with Snow Leopard). When you have faces recognised in photograph they will appear under "Faces" which apepars as a kind of cork board with polaroid like images attached to it. You can click on peoples names to view all recognised photographs of that person and it will also show any other photographs that *might* be of the same person (which you can then confirm or deny). The new Places folder is basically the place you go to view your photographs by geographical location on a Google Map. It will plot photographs on the map based on any geo-tags or manually entered place names.
