Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Share and Share iLife ‘06

Share and Share iLife ‘06

If you want to share your movies, music and photos with someone, iLife 06 is now the best way to do it.

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Where this differs from simple .Mac syncing is in the use of RSS feeds. Safari and iTunes users have become used to RSS feeds as a great way to keep up to date with changes to web sites and for podcasting. But RSS feeds are a standard across the whole computing world; all kinds of programs use RSS feeds, including the open source browser Firefox, services such as Bloglines and dedicated RSS readers. Since iPhoto 6 uses RSS feeds for photocasting, any RSS-aware program or service can subscribe to your photocast and download your photos as they become available.

Well, that’s the theory, but since Apple messed up the RSS implementation slightly, it doesn’t work with all the readers it’s supposed to. Expect a future update to fix that. Nevertheless, photocasting will almost certainly prove a great way to share photos with friends in the future.

A couple of other great new additions to iPhoto 6 are the ability to create calendars and cards. Cards work almost exactly as you’d expect if you’ve ever put together an iPhoto album: pick a picture; decide whether you want a postcard or a greetings card; pick a theme and a layout; add some words; upload everything to Apple; wait for the cards to arrive. They’re acceptably priced and the whole process really is very simple.

Calendars are slightly more complicated but have all sorts of cunning features. Again, you get to choose from a variety of themes and layouts to create your calendar. What’s clever is the ability to customise every day on the calendar. You can add holidays from all around the world. You can add birthdays from your Address Book. But you can also add pictures from your album to every day in the calendar, just by dragging and dropping. The calendars are pretty nifty, but we don’t expect you’ll be needing to use the function until much later in the later. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple can deliver when the rush really starts.

There are a number of other extra features in iPhoto that are also worth discussing. Full-screen editing is a handy tool if you’d like to be able to see what you’re doing when editing. The effects palette is a useful little gadget pilfered from the iMac’s Photo Booth application. It allows you to apply effects such as sepia tinting and vignetting, as you’d expect, but each icon is a preview of what the picture will look like after the effect is applied, making it easier to know in advance what you want. The comparison button makes it easier to see what effect an effect has had on a picture, since you get to see the original next to the edited picture.

A couple of features that seem small are also worth picking up. iPhoto now has the option to leave photos where they are when you import them, rather than copying them straight into its library. If you’re the kind of person who prefers to keep pictures in specific places, that’ll be a godsend. Equally important is the now-default option to embed ColorSync profiles in imported photos. If you’ve ever wondered why your photos don’t look quite the way they’re supposed to when they printed or on-screen, hopefully that will be a thing of the past (provided you’ve calibrated your monitor correctly).

Overall, iPhoto is an excellent upgrade. If you’ve no time for any of the other apps in the iLife package, it’s probably not quite worth the asking price alone, but it comes pretty close.

World Wide What?
One last thing. Long time iPhoto users will notice that the Save to .Mac function has disappeared from iPhoto. The .Mac slideshow function is still there but there’s a new option as well: “Send to iWeb”. Shock. Horror. What can this mean?

As you may have guessed, there’s a new member of the iLife family: iWeb. The intent of iWeb is to make creating web sites, blogs, podcasts, videocasts – in fact, anything ‘webby’ – easy to use, while simultaneously taking over all the web features of all the other iLife programs. Isn’t Apple putting all its eggs in one basket there?

No. Even if the most complicated design package you’ve ever used is Word, iWeb should come easily to you. You start with one of the many excellent templates Apple provides. Then, you edit the text on the template, change the pictures, select publish and it’s up on your .Mac account. If you don’t have a .Mac account, you can still publish your site to a folder and then upload it to your actual web site. All very simple really.

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