Aug 8

Written by: James Burke
Wednesday, August 08, 2007

The iLife suite ships free of charge with all Apple desktops and laptops, but every year there are a few upgrade to the suite which sometimes are compelling enough to pay for the upgrade. I am not normally won over enough for the upgrade but this time there are some significant improvements that start to bridge the gap between desktop applications and the Internet via automatically generated Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

iLife comprises of:

• iPhoto
• iMovie
• .Mac Web Gallery
• iDVD
• Garageband and
• iWeb
  

Further details of iLife are available at the Apple website.

For me the key steps forward were the improvements in iPhoto and, finally, improvements in the .Mac space and integration of that space via the .Mac web gallery that allows non mac users to view and contribute to photo albums via any web browser or even via email.

A great live .Mac Web Gallery is available here that shows off the Web 2.0 like qualities very well that is delivered via integration with iPhoto – all Flash generated.

For me, if you are a mac user and take digital photographs them the upgrade to iLife 08 is a no brainer – Flickr needs to develop some innovation to keep it subscribers…

iMovie is a totally new application – a bold move with no minor tweaks here.

The other applications are not really for me but I’m sure I will still dip into from time to time.

To get the most out of iLife a .Mac account is needed but the default 1Gb storage space is just not up to it - thankfully an upgrade to 10Gb at no additional charge was also announced with immediate effect; once the speed of synchronisation is sorted out with this space I suspect that it will soon become second nature to use this "virtual drive".

A Quicktime video of the Apple keynote delivered by Steve Jobs in his usual upbeat manner (although strangely no cheering mac crowds this time) is available from the Apple website.

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