Neil Duffin Blog

Apple have released a iLife ‘08, iWork ‘08 and a new improved iMac.

The new iMac is very slim-line with either a 20" or 24" screen and a new super small keyboard. They utilise a 64bit Core 2 processor at up to 2.8GHz. The graphics chip has been upgraded to a HD 2400 XT or HD 2600 XT, with a maximum of 256Mb of video RAM.

Main memory is easier to add (just remove a single screw) and now goes up to 4Gb. The machines now have firewire 400, 800 and 3 USB 2 ports. It’s also possible to have a 1Tb hard drive on the 24" model (750Gb on the 20").

The new version of iLife ‘08 is a major upgrade too.

iPhoto sports a new ‘events view’ to help you find images. It’s kind of like an automatic folder creation system. Everything from a day is placed in a new folder but you can split them or merge them for multiple events in one day or an event that covers multiple days. You can also ’skim’ through the images in an event (just click & drag to flick through them) and you have a free choice of the image that represents an event in the gallery.

There’s also a way to hide pictures that aren’t your best but that you don’t want to delete. There’s also a better search system and better editing tools, including copy & paste of settings. Printing, books and calendar making has been give a boost too.

There’s a new .Mac Web Gallery system - but you need to be a paying member of .Mac to use that. The system is just a very nice web gallery system, using Web 2.0. It allows high quality downloads for printing and for other people to contribute images. The system even works with the iPhone - including sending image you take on the phone to the gallery. You can also ’skim’ the photos on the web site.

iMovie has been rewritten so you can make quick 5 minute movies with 30 minutes work (supposedly). The package now manages all your video in a similar way to iPhoto. It takes footage from AVCHD, DV, digital cameras that shoot video and HD camcorders. Clips can be scrubbed (same as skimming iPhoto events). You can then drag these clips into the movie, add music, add images from iPhoto and transitions too. It will then export this in formats for just about anything, including web sites (.Mac web sites & YouTube). It has a very simple interface, but it may be too simple for anything other than quick movies.

iWeb has been enhanced with ‘web widgets’ that let you do things like add Google Maps, paste web-snippets and put Google AdSense onto your site. It creates index pages for your sites, if you have a lot of content. You an use personal domains and integrate pages from your .Mac account too.

iDVD has improved performance and better encoding, plus a 10 new animated themes.

GarageBand supports 24bit audio, writes scores and has a new ‘magic’ feature. This supports various types of music, jazz, reggae, rock, blues, etc and appears to be a somewhat gimmicky way to play around with the instruments from pre-recorded music. The result can then be exported as a project which you can build on.

Apple thinks that all this extra stuff means that you’ll likely have more on-line content and so they have increased the storage on .Mac accounts to 10Gb.

For the less interesting parts of life, there is also iWork ‘08.

There’s an upgrade to Keynote, new text effects, themes and transitions. A new feature that creates alpha keys for images automatically. Another feature that lets you insert image and add effects to them. You can do animations in the sides now too.

Pages has been adapted so that it can be used for word processing more easily, while still keeping the page layout features. It now tracks changes (and is compatible with Word documents). There’s a load of new templates.

Finally, there’s also the long rumoured 3rd app - which is indeed called "Numbers". A spread-sheet package - hooray!

This works in a similar way to Keynote & Pages, ie it tries to be easy to use. Its interface is similar to Pages in that you can drag page elements (graphs, tables, etc) around to change the layout. You can easily add formulas, plus you can add multiple tables onto a sheet and change them without effecting the other tables on the sheet. The printing features have been designed to allow you to see what’s going on before you print and adjust the layout interactively. There’s also a template system (which you can customise). Finally, it imports and exports Excel files.

Best of all, the price is the same as iLife @ $79.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under News, Apple Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.