iLife '08

iPhoto is the only iLife app I really use regularly, and GarageBand occasionally, but it’s nice to have the others around just in case I can think of some reason to use them.

iPhoto’s new ‘events’ view took a little while to win me over, but now I’d never go back. It drastically improves upon, and completely replaces, the ‘rolls’ metaphor from earlier versions. If you’re upgrading, it pretty much just converts all of your rolls to events. You can combine or split them without much fuss, and they’re sorted by the date in the metadata rather than the date they were added to the library (yes!). I had to go to the help file to figure out that to combine events: you need to select them both then double-click one, and then you can drag photos from one to the other. The thumbnail view is really pretty and a nice way to browse, although I still don’t like this ‘hover mouse over to quickly cycle thumbnails’ thing (which I will call ‘hover scrub’ for short), and there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn it off. But that’s minor. Another little annoyance is that double-clicking a photo now ‘magnifies’ it to fill the window, but without any controls to move back or forward in the event, but this can be changed in Preferences. The most awkward thing about the whole events metaphor is that the alternate ‘albums’ metaphor even still exists, as there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it any more.

The iPhoto web gallery feature looks nice (despite the annoying ‘hover scrub’ being fully implemented in JavaScript O_o) but it in no way justifies the still-ridiculous $99/year you have to pay for .mac service in order to use it - especially when the PicasaWeb iPhoto plugin is free, and the PicasaWeb service is free and is almost as good (if not as flashy). ( edit : the plugin doesn’t work with iPhoto ‘08… I’m sure there’ll be a fix soon. In the meantime, drag photos from iPhoto to the standalone PicasaWeb Uploader app. Works the same, almost.)

iMovie is a completely new app going by the name of an older one. I never really put the effort into figuring out how to use the old one, but I only started fooling around with the new one for a few minutes, and before I knew it I had strewn together segments from all of the video clips I’d taken on my digital camera from my iPhoto library, with transitions and music and stuff. The ‘hover scrub’, unlike in iPhoto, really works beautifully here, with audio too. It really is amazingly easy to throw something together. My little Mac mini (Core Duo 1.6 GHz) struggled a bit occasionally, but performance was very good, if not perfect. Built-in YouTube support is great too, although it’d be nice if you didn’t still have to to wait aeons for YouTube to do that ‘processing’ step after you upload. (I don’t see why you can’t just upload in whatever format is natively used, since presumably what YouTube is doing is transcoding.)

GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD didn’t seem to have changed much at first glance.