The iLife suite is one of the best reasons to buy a Mac, since every new machine comes with full versions of all the applications. With the release of Apple iLife ’09, the Cupertino-based company is hoping that Mac users will be tempted to upgrade. Apple’s team has given a lot of thought to how people use their digital media and what Apple can add to the experience. Ease of use is key throughout, and new features deliver real value, usually without adding complexity. Considering that the improvements to these five apps are numerous, the experience of using them is completely enjoyable, and the price is a modest $79, iLife ’09 easily earns LAPTOP’s Editors’ Choice Award.
iPhoto ’09
iPhoto seems to be getting the most attention with this release, mostly due to two novel organization features: Faces and Places. With both Faces and Places, Apple recognized that digital photo libraries are growing and that keywords don’t work for organization because users don’t input them. Both systems offer a new perspective on photo collections and a new way to view them.
Both Faces and Places are in the top left corner, under the existing Events and Photos categories. With Faces, we were able to train iPhoto to recognize the people who populate our photos so that it tagged photos automatically with later imports. It doesn’t quite work like magic, though. Photo detection isn’t that advanced, apparently, because even after we’d trained iPhoto with several hundred photos, it was still averaging below 50 percent: if a face was sideways or tilted, the program could not recognize it. Still, Apple has made tagging fun, and the process of putting names to faces became almost a game.
Apple has also taken a cue from Google Picasa; Places reads the place information on geotagged photos (you can manually input location information on regular photos as well), then creates a map of where your pictures were taken. We were also able to add or modify place information, either for individual pictures or for entire events, by clicking a small “i” that appears in the lower right corner of photos when we hovered our mouse over them.
We were impressed with the improvements to the photo-editing tools, as well. The saturation tool now keeps skin tones accurate while saturating other colors in a photo. Red-eye reduction now works with face detection to automatically remove red eye from problem pictures. It worked perfectly about half the time; after that, we needed to remove the color by hand.
Other iPhoto improvements include automatic Flickr and Facebook uploading and professional-looking slideshow effects that had our jaws on the floor. One effect called Sliding Panels moves photos on and off the screen, with two or three showing at any time; it reminded us of Hollywood-quality opening movie credits—it’s that slick. Another effect called Shatter has transitions that break the photos up into different-colored layers, revolves them, then compresses the layers to form a new picture. It looks almost too advanced for a home computer, but there it is.
