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Apple iLife 08
Apple iLife 08
Steve spent most of the time spent allocated to iLife on the iPhoto software. This makes sense however because most consumers are moving towards the digital life and digital cameras are everywhere - your regular camera, your cell phone. You can get photos from friends via e-mail and CDs. The biggest improvement in the iPhoto software is the use of "Events". The idea is to group photos together by time. Typically, you'll go on a vacation, or to a party, or do something that is special enough that you want to take pictures of it (why does anyone take pictures of anything anyways?). By grouping the photos together into events, large libraries of photos become far more manageable and easy to use. And iPhoto uses time to delineate where one event ends and another event begins. When you are looking at your collection of events, you can skim through the photos as your mouse cursor is over top of the album. iPhoto is also enhanced in other ways, one neat feature demonstrated was the ability to copy photo adjustments from one photo to other photos. You can hide photos as well, so that if you don't like to ever delete anything you can just hide them in the event and don't have to look at them if you're showing the event off to friends. Or if your friends aren't around, you can upload the photos into your .mac account. The web gallery function is very impressive, it allows for a rich experience - similar to what you might get with a desktop application. You can also have collaborative galleries that allow users to get an email address to submit their own photos, and submit photos from the iPhone as well as any other phone that can send pictures it takes. Next, the iMovie software was completely redone. An engineer at Apple rewrote the entire application after he found it too time consuming to use the previous version of iMovie or Final Cut. After shooting lots of HD video he found that he couldn't successfully make a five-minute movie in 30 minutes to show his friends. The software manages all your video clips in a library, and allows you to piece together clips, and select segments from those clips. The same skimming idea that exists in iPhoto in an event, you can skim through the video inside the library. You can add text, background music, transitions and still photos. The iMovie '08 application reminds me of a demo Silverlight application I saw earlier this year at a Microsoft event locally, though the iMovie application is far more advanced. The demo wasn't nearly as smooth in terms of video acquisition, editing, effects, etc, but after seeing the keynote video of the new iMovie it made me think of the application I had saw earlier. Of course the biggest difference is that Apple has a new product out now, whereas Microsoft's Silverlight video editing tool is still a demo. iMovie also integrates with .mac as well, allowing you to upload your completed movies up to the .mac account and show up with your iPhoto events. You can also publish to iTunes for iPods, iPhones and AppleTV, and finally upload to YouTube. Next up is iWeb, which allows you to create web pages and post them to your .mac account. The biggest feature is widgets. Much like OS X, you can have a Google Maps widget on your website for a party or embed the URL that YouTube provides. The other new features are a media index page - so instead of 20 albums in the navigation area, you get a "photographs" webpage that will contain all the photos you want to share, along with theme switching, personal domain support and Google AdSense to add a cash flow to your website too.
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1 User Comment 1 - Posted by
dmacvid
on August 23, 2007 - 8:57 am I just installed iLife 08 and upgraded my previous version of iLife.I opened my domain in the new iWeb and found that both my photo galleries had been deleted and replaced with "New" blank photo gallery pages. Plus all my page links were no longer centered. Impressive I run a dual monitor setup for Final Cut studio with one monitor running on a non-compatible quart extreme ATI PCI card. My other monitor card is the one that came with my G5 that is quartz extreme compatible. iMovie will not run because it detects the no.2 non quartz extreme PCI card instead of the no.1 quartz extreme compatible AGP card. So I can run Final Cut studio but not iMovie. I paid $80 bucks to have this happen. 1 star Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
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