After a few days break to help me absorb the information Apple put forward, I thought I would share my opinions on iLife ’09, iWork ’09 and iTunes going DRM free.

iLife ’09

The first thing I should say is I am not going to buy iLife ’09. As usual Apple updated iLife suite, the major updates are in iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.

iPhoto

In iLife ’08 Apple introduced Events a great way to organise your photos, now they have expanded on this with faces and places. Faces organises your photos by people, it uses face detection to find the peoples face, and face recognition to group photos of the same person. Faces is a feature I would love to have in Aperture as often I am asked to find photos of people, and tagging each photo is a lot of effort. Places does what it says on the tin, it organises your photos by their GPS coordinates or if they don’t have any you can place a pin on a map. This would be great if you go on holiday and want to see photos from a certain place, but I think it will become more effective when GPS becomes more common in cameras. There is also integration with Facebook and Flickr.

iMovie

iMovie now has precise editing allowing you to make cleaner cuts, it also gives you have much more control over audio manipulation. This precise editing is reason enough to get iLife ’09, it looks extremely slick to use. You can add video effects and change video speed; you can do green screen but this was not shown in the keynote. A great new feature is themes which allows you to add and change titles and lower thirds quickly and easily. The final new feature is maps you can create 2D or 3D rendered maps that fly from place to place. Maps has to be the most exciting thing in the Keynote for me; Earlier this year I shot lots of video of Iceland and this map tool would have been great to show where we went.

GarageBand

It has been a long time since there has been some real improvement here, but Apple have defiantly improved the app by adding lessons, it add a whole new experience and make GarageBand a very different app.

The only reason I am not buying iLife ’09 is because I don’t use any of the apps instead of iPhoto I use Aperture and i don’t do much video and iMovie ’08 is sufficient for my needs.

iWork

There are some great new updates to iWork that make it a well worth purchase. I am planning on upgrading to iWork ’09 simply because of the cool new animations you can do inside of Keynote.

Pages

As you might expect new themes, mail merge integration and a full screen mode. I can see the full screen mode coming in handy when in lessons, the mail merge would have been helpful when doing my IT GCSE because instead of having to use Office I would have been able to use my Mac.

Keynote

Some cool looking new animations such as magic move, chart animation and new themes. Some of these animation would come in handy when doing my English presentation, and I just love to play with animations. You can also buy the keynote remote app to remotely control your keynotes for £0.59, it requires iWork ’09.

Numbers

Additional formula’s have been added, new chart styles and table categories. These are all basic functions that will hopefully make Numbers a more appertising app for Excel addicts.

iWork.com

iWork.com allows users to share and download documents as well as comment and chat about their progress. If you are calibrating on a document it is a great way for the client to see it and add comments to what they think needs to be changed. I like the idea but don’t think I will use it and don’t think it is right they should charge for it, it would be a nice part of MobileMe.

iTunes DRM Free

After EMI went DRM Free we new DRM would fall, but it was just a matter of time and with the Amazon MP3 store being DRM free with all major labels Apple had to do something. There is now varied pricing through out the store but I personally have yet to see anything that is still not £0.79 in the UK. To start 80% of the library will be iTunes Plus but by the end of Q1 Apple hope to have a 100%.