Share and Share iLife ‘06

• Article 52 of 53
• iCreate, March 2006
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Would using a Mac be half as much as fun if we didn’t have iLife to organise our digital lifestyles? Of course it wouldn’t. Apple’s little black bag of goodies has justifiably wowed the crowds for years now, impressing with its simplicity and elegance. But as with everything new, we soon get used to it and take it for granted. Time moves on, technology improves, as do our own demands. We just want more.

That’s why every year Apple upgrades iLife, adding new features and sometimes completely new programs to keep us constantly at the cutting edge and to make our iLives even easier to manage.

iLife 06 brings a new program, a web design application called iWeb, to the now familiar iLife suite, a whole stack of new features and the familiar yearly question: is the latest version of iLife worth spending £55 on, or is the version you’re using good enough?

To help you answer that, we at iCreate have been putting iLife 06 through its paces and we are happy to report that the answer is an unequivocal yes. Carry on reading to find out what’s good, what’s bad, what’s indifferent and more in the latest version of iLife.

What’s the point, Apple?
First, a warning. iLife’s getting bigger and better with every passing year. You know how we can tell that? This year, iLife comes on a dual-layer DVD since the installer weighs in at an astonishing 6GB and requires 10GB of free disk space. If you have a laptop or an older Mac, pay careful attention to how much free space you have before you buy iLife 06 or you’re going to be stuck with a load of software you can’t use.

Even using the installer options to trim the software won’t help you that much, unless you plan on dispensing with GarageBand, iDVD and maybe iMovie and iWeb as well. There are (secret) ways to install parts on an external disk drive if you have one, but nine times out of ten, that’s where it all starts to go pear-shaped, so try to avoid this kind of sneakiness.

There are other, more stringent requirements you’ll have to deal with, too. You’ll need at least a 733MHz G4 (sorry G3 owners), OS X 10.3.9 (sorry Jaguar owners) and a DVD drive (sorry old iBook users). iLife compatibility is rapidly becoming an elite club.

But assuming you get passed the bouncers, what will you find? First off, iTunes. Assuming you have a broadband connection, you’ll almost certainly have this already, so we won’t dwell on it too long. But if you’re on narrowband and haven’t updated since iLife 05, there have been all sorts of improvements, such as support for podcasts and videos. This will makes it welcome for some, but staggeringly superfluous for everyone else. At best, it’s a way for Apple to get iTunes updates out to the narrowband world while pretending iLife is bigger than in actually is.

The first program of iLife 06 proper is iPhoto 6. This is by far the most popular of all the iLife programs so it seems fitting that it’s the one with the most improvements. While it’s easy to concentrate on new features, we’d first like to mention than iPhoto 6 has a slightly more polished interface, a stonking great increase in the maximum number of photos allowed (250,000) and is considerably speedier than iPhoto 5. These make it slightly nicer to use, although they probably don’t justify £55 by themselves.

Top-billing of the new iPhoto features is ‘photocasting’. At heart, it’s a way to let other iPhoto users include your albums in their library. For each album you want to share, you publish a photocast ‘feed’ on .Mac and they subscribe to it. They can then download your photos from the feed. When you update it, their albums automatically change and download any new photos.

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.

If you want to be a little racy and publish photo galleries, movies, podcasts or even one of those new-fangled blog things, don’t worry: iWeb has templates for all of them. Almost everything complicated has been removed from the basic interface, with only an Inspector palette full of options to really let you tinker, making this the easiest web design tool on the market for the price: RapidWeaver is close but still not as simple; Freeway is as simple, but is far more expensive.

By itself, iWeb would probably rank as an interesting piece of shareware, but that’s about it really. Since it’s effectively iWeb 1.0, expect it to be a bit something really special by the time iLife 08 comes out. Right now, it’s only a killer in combination with the rest of the iLife suite.

Let’s make beautiful music together
You could be forgiven for never having touched GarageBand since the day you got your Mac or you installed iLife. Unless you have the musical instinct, it’s a one-trick pony heading in a different direction from you. GarageBand 3, however, has branched out from being a simple musical composition program to a complete sound editing suite.

Podcasting has been all the rage over the last year, and many people are now creating and publishing their own podcasts. This is by no means easy. Even if you’re creating a simple MP3 that’s mostly talk, you still have to record speech, edit out mistakes, join tracks together, fade music in and out: basically, you have to be a radio DJ. If you want to produce an enhanced podcast, you need to be able to add bookmarks and a picture track. Then there’s actually publishing it.

Garageband’s new podcast engineering studio makes all that easy. Since it’s a sound editing suite already, you already have the ability to fade tracks in and out, cut and edit: that’s now the easy part, because GarageBand is very, very good at it. Now though, it will reduce sound volume automatically if there’s speech on an audio track: ‘ducking’ in the trade.

Getting speech in is easier as well since GarageBand can now import the speech of an iChat audio conference with a click of the record button. Each participant’s speech will end up as a separate track, making it easy to vary their volumes independently.

Of course, if you never touched GarageBand because of your lack of musical ability, all these new tools are nothing without some good tunes. GarageBand now comes with 100 groups of jingles of varying lengths so that you can add incidental music and backing tracks at the right moments.

When you’re done making your new podcast, you can also add pictures to the new GarageBand podcast artwork track. As with all the iLife applications, you can use the iLife media browser to use photos from your iPhoto library directly. Then, after you’re happy with the podcast, you can send it directly to an iWeb podcast page.

Not all the new things in GarageBand are related to podcasting. You can now import an iMovie project into GarageBand and score it, using all the musical tools available to you. But for the most part, podcasting is the be-all and end-all of GarageBand 3.0. If that’s what you’re looking to do, you really won’t find an easier tool than GarageBand. But if GarageBand is already your thing and podcasting ain’t got the swing, don’t worry too much if you decide to skip iLife 06.

I DVD therefore I am
You wouldn’t think there was much more Apple could add to iDVD, and to a certain extent, you’d be right. One of the highlighted features of iDVD 6 is the ability to use third-party DVD burners, which was also a highlighted feature of iDVD 5. Sometimes, Steve’s reality distortion field can be strong that we think our DVD burner didn’t work with iDVD 5. But it’s not that strong.

Also on the list is Magic iDVD, a way to create DVDs in a single screen, if you’re too busy to cope with drop zones and menus. It’s really just a better version of the existing “One Click DVD” option, but it doesn’t really save you all that much extra time. It’s nice, but not fantastic.

Enhanced map views are, erm, slightly better map views, so we’ll skirt quickly over them to autofill drop zones. Once you’ve added all your movies to your DVD and selected a theme, now all you have to do is click on a button and all the drop zones will be populated with your movies. We estimate this will save you almost a whole minute per project.

So ignore these “new” features and concentrate on what’s actually new. Widescreen support is the welcome extra, given widescreen televisions have been pretty common for over seven years now. However, since most other DVD authoring software can’t cope with widescreen either, iDVD has still managed to get a slow march on the others.

All the new iDVD 6 themes, of which there are many, are compatible with both widescreen and 4:3 projects. Older themes aren’t, however, so you’ll have to hope the new themes are better than the ones you’re using if you’re hoping to create widescreen DVDs.

But that’s about it by way of new features. Despite this, iDVD remains the top DVD authoring package for the Mac short of Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. It may be resting on its laurels a little, but the new themes are excellent and widescreen support is something worth upgrading for. Nevertheless, we would have liked a little more bite and a little less repackaging of existing features.

I’m ready for my close up
Let’s end this on a high though. iMovie HD fills in more than a few gaps in iMovie’s featureset. At last, you can do decent titles that match iDVD’s excellent menu themes and they’re as easy to use. Just drag your clips to a title theme and iMovie will do the rest. Real-time titling effects make it easy to experiment with titles as well.

Just when you thought podcasting and photocasting were enough, iMovie HD now includes videocasting. As you might guess, that’s a podcast for videos. With iMovie HD, you can add chapter markers and hyperlinks within iMovie and then publish your videocast with iWeb. Problematically, anyone watching your videocast will need QuickTime 7, rather than one of the more common codecs used in videocasts. But with videocasting still a relatively rare activity, not many people will notice just yet.

Audio also gets a boost. Building on the slightly anaemic tools of iMovie HD 5, version six gets eight new audio effects and a noise reducer for cancelling out stray noises, such as camcorder whir and wind. There’s a graphic equalizer for balancing the soundtrack. And, of course, you can export your movie to GarageBand if none of that is enough for you.

If movies are your thing, then iMovie HD 6 is a reasonably impressive upgrade. We’d have liked a few more under the hood changes, such as support for muxed MPEG movies, particularly since many digital cameras use that format for movie-capture. But what is on offer is worth its share of the iLife upgrade cost.

Overall, iLife 06 is a decent enough upgrade. If iPhoto or GarageBand are your only interest and you don’t want to join the new pod/photo/videocast revolution, we wouldn’t blame you for holding off until next year for the upgrade. £55 for a single upgrade is maybe a little too much for most people, but it’s roughly the same price as two pieces of shareware. If there are two apps in 06 with the features you need, it’s a good investment. But if you use them all, that’s £11 for each program and they’re certainly all worth that. If your Mac really is your digital lifestyle hub, iLife 06 will give it a turn.

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