My copy of iLife ‘06 showed up today. I don’t feel like I’m the right person to give it a full review, but here’s my two cents:

• iPhoto: is much faster (seriously, *much* faster with my 5613 photos), has cool date overlay when scrolling, a nice full screen implementation, photocasting (would love this if my fam had macs), calendars, cards and iWeb integration.
• iWeb: The themes look pretty nice. Looks simple enough to use and the themes seem pleasing. I really just loaded it up, clicked around and that was it.
• iMovie: new “themes” seem nifty and added audio effects.
• iDVD: 16:9 and new themes that seem to match iMovie’s.
• GarageBand: I haven’t used GB, but now that it has a podcast “mode” I may give it a whirl for the rare occasion when I record an audio note. You can also bring in video, presumably for a vidcast, but that didn’t seem complete nor the focus. Requires more investigation.
• iTunes: Should they really say this is part of the iLife suite anymore? Seems more appropriate to consider it part of the OS, like Safari and Mail. No comments.

Well, that’s what stuck out to me. Am I happy with the purchase? Yes. iPhoto got lots of attention and iMovie’s themes seem useful. Those being the two apps I use most, I’m pleased. Plus I’m sure I missed tons of stuff in my 60 minutes with it, so I look forward to experiencing and reading more thorough reviews containing the other gems I missed.

update: iMovie now lets you open multiple projects at the same time. That’s very handy, yet sad that it took this long.
update 2: iMovie should have a full-screen edit mode just like iPhoto.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Apple, Commentary, Personal. 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.