Real Kato Blog: Apple Watch: Macworld Roundup, Part II

Updates to iLife and iWork, and a few other announcements.

Yesterday Apple rolled out new versions of the iLife family of applications: this suite includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand. And now, there's a new application called iWeb, in line with various rumors that had circulated earlier.

iWeb is indeed a web design application, and it looks to be a pretty good one. It supports blogging and podcasting, and something relatively new that Apple calls "Photocasting". This is a way for people to publish photos via iPhoto and .Mac, and have other people subscribe to those photo "broadcasts". (It's a small move towards the Web 2.0 model. Apple seems heavily in favor of publish-and-subscribe models via RSS, though they still haven't really caught on to tagging.) .Mac still doesn't support interactive web sites using PHP and SQL. But for a novice web site creator, this looks to be a huge step up from the tools that have been available in the past. It's even a decent step up from the old method of using iPhoto to upload albums to dot-mac. Pretty cool. I'll expect refinements when iWeb 2 comes along, though; in particular, I'd expect support for LiveJournal-style networking between different .Mac users.

iPhoto brings a few minor improvements, the most notable one being the integrated support for Photocasting. It's also supposed to be significantly faster than the previous version. Other than that, there's full-screen editing, new one-click effects, and new publishing options including calendars, greeting cards, and books.

iMovie now supports animated themes for making movies, and that looks to be pretty cool. You can make fairly sophisticated titles and transitions based on these themes with relative ease. I think it might take a while for people to appreciate how powerful this capability is. The only downside is that having a limited set of themes might get to be restrictive after a while; I've found that to be true with a number of Apple's template-based design systems.

iDVD's major new features include a "Magic iDVD" button for easy one-click creation of DVDs, and support for widescreen movies. Other improvements are relatively minor.

GarageBand now supports a "Podcast studio" feature. Steve Jobs gave a humorous demo of this feature during his keynote presentation. It looks pretty slick. Combined with iWeb, this should make podcasting dead-simple. One feature Steve didn't mention is GarageBand's improved integration with iMovie. It's now possible to make iMovie scores directly from GarageBand, and easily synchronize audio and video clips. Pretty neat.

Overall, it's a pretty solid package of improvements, and at $79, it's a good value... unless, maybe, you've been paying for every annual version of iLife that's come out before, and you're tired of continuously paying for upgrades. Come on, Apple, how about some upgrade pricing deals?

Then again, you could just buy a new Mac and get all this for free.

On the iWork side, the changes seem smaller. New themes and transitions? Yawn. 3D charts? Meh. Tables with calculations? That's a step towards the "Numbers" application that some folks predicted, but it's certainly not an Excel-killer. I don't see a compelling reason to upgrade from iWork '05, or to cross-grade from Microsoft Office. Owners of new Macs who don't want to shell out for Office might have a reason to buy this, but other than that, I think the audience for this will be limited.

* * *

Rounding out Apple's Macworld announcements:

- $5.7 billion in sales last quarter. That's huge. Apple's stock jumped up 5% yesterday, and is up again today.
- Microsoft has formalized a five-year agreement to continue updating Microsoft Office for the Mac. That's important. I wonder if Apple had to give something to Microsoft to make that happen.
- An iPod remote control with FM tuner. Interesting; it fills a hole in the iPod's feature spec. But $49 extra? I don't know. At $19, it'd be a no-brainer add-on purchase. At $49, it's in the "I could probably do without it" category.
- New TV shows available on the iTunes music store, including Saturday Night Live clips. Sweet; I'm gonna go get that Chris Farley motivational speaker sketch right now.
- New partnerships with auto makers for iPod integration. I'll tell ya, what other music player company is making any headway into automobile integration?

* * *

Macworld announcements from other companies:

- Google Earth is now officially available for the Mac. Go get it.
- TiVo revealed an early version of TiVoToGo for the Mac; we might expect to see it by mid-year.
- Sling Media announced that a Mac-compatible SlingBox will be available in the second quarter of this year.

* * *

So okay, that was a pretty big Macworld! One last thing that Steve Jobs mentioned... April 1, 2006, will be Apple's 30th anniversary. Will we see a 30th Anniversary Mac? Or something completely new? It wouldn't surprise me at all.

Permalink 2 Comment

Posted by Ken in: techwatch

Comments

Comment #1 from JuanC (Guest)
2006 Jan 11 - 3:11 pm : #

I want one of those iMacs very badly. If I watched more TV I would get a slingbox too.

Comment #2 from Crouching Hamster (Guest)
2006 Jan 11 - 4:18 pm : #

Mac Daddy, you bring great news to the masses. I'm all tingly. And I'll be all geeked out this weekend downloading!

Comments are closed for this post.

Search This Site