iLife ’09 and why you want it February 6, 2009
Posted by David in Apple, Software.add a comment
Last week Mac owners were treated to updates of the two most essential software collections for their computers.
iWorks ‘09 gathers together the best office-type functional software (Pages, the word processor, is assisting me in the creation of this week’s column) but far more excitingly for the more creative type, iLife ’09 shows off some excellent applications that really should form the backbone of just about everybody’s Apple computer, including iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and the unrivaled fun and power of Garageband.
In its previous incarnations, iPhoto was already doing a sterling job of managing my ever-growing collection of digital photography but a couple of new features are little short of mind blowing.
First up is ‘Faces’ which attempts to sort your pictures by who is in them. By telling it the name of one or more people in a particular shot, it uses face recognition technology to find them in others. Initial results were usually accurate and sometimes way out (it suggested that my daughter might be her grandfather, for example!) but guesses become more reliable as errors are corrected.
The other new feature, called ‘Places’, had a friend and me literally gasping in amazement.
A Google map of the world featured a forest of red pushpin icons around central England. Zooming in increased the number of pins until they were dotted around the southern half of the country with particular emphasis on Oxfordshire. Certain modern cameras and the iPhone 3G plot your location coordinates when a picture is taken and embed the position within the photo’s data. ‘Places’ can then literally pinpoint where a photograph was taken anywhere in the world. Amazing.
I though I’d caught it out when a path of red pins traced a line right down the middle of the Thames until the pictures reminded me of a boat trip last summer.
iMovie makes editing your video footage an absolute breeze and my personal favourite, Garageband, combines a home recording studio and music teacher that is unrivaled by any other software out there.
No Mac should be without iLife. An excellent suite of software that’s just £69.
