Apple's lifestyle suite gets an overhaul and some new tricks

Just in case you were wondering, you haven't accidentally slept through iLife '07. Apple has decided that since 2007 is closer to its end than its start, it would skip ahead to iLife '08.

With so much development time going into Leopard, the iPhone and iPods, updates to iLife will probably become a little further apart. Unlike '06, which brought a whole new program in the shape of iWeb, '08 consists of updates and changes to the existing suite.

In fact there's one exception: iMovie '08 is actually a completely new program which feels nothing like previous versions. And there are new technologies and ideas running through many of the updated iApps that are sure to feature heavily in Leopard. The new iLife is certified to work with the new OS on its eventual release.

Universal binary

Every program is universal binary, to work on PowerPCs and Intel Macs, though the system requirements are creeping up as is common with all software. A G4 is the bare minimum, and iMovie '08 requires at least a G5 at 1.9GHz or faster.

The suite requires OS X 10.4.9 or later, as well as QuickTime 7.2. These requirements shouldn't prove problematic for most Mac owners with the possible exception of iMovie which requires a fair amount of grunt.

As always, the faster your Mac and the more RAM you have installed, the smoother your experience will be. Happily the footprint has come down to a reasonable 3GB including all the content and templates, and the price for a single user copy stays at £55 while the family pack creeps up slightly to £69.

Upgrading from the '06 versions of the iLife suite is painless and took just a couple of minutes on our G5 and MacBook. At the time of writing there were already minor updates available for iPhoto and iWeb which fixed some small issues.

It's worth mentioning that iTunes is also a part of iLife and does come on the DVD, but it's so well established and widely used that it's generally thought of as a program in its own right, so let's put it aside for the moment and look at the changes to the major iLife apps.

iPhoto '08

Apple's photo editing software got some significant improvements in '06 and that's also the case here. As you shoot and collect more and more digital photos, you start to run into the problem of large, cluttered photo libraries.

Finding stuff can be a nightmare, especially when your camera rather unhelpfully tags pictures with numbers which mean nothing to you. To sort out this problem, Apple has come up with the idea of Events. The concept is that in all probability, the pictures you take on a single day are all from the same event - like someone's birthday, or a trip to the beach.

When you import from a camera, iPhoto now prompts you to name the event, and then tags the images accordingly. If you have old pictures, iPhoto sorts them into events based on the day they were taken; it's easy to rename them if you wish to.

As well as the Library view, which shows you all your pictures, you also have Events view, which shows each event and saves a lot of screen space.

The really cool part is that if you move the mouse over an event, you can flick through all the pictures in the set within its box, which Apple calls 'skimming'. This is incredibly useful and means far less clicking to quickly locate pictures. You can set the poster frame for an event by hitting the [spacebar] when you roll over the picture you want. You can also split or combine sets of photos very quickly.

Searching is also greatly improved, with a unified search box letting you specify date, keyword or rating. When you double-click to enlarge an image, it now zooms to occupy the screen. The editing palette is still present in its muted, translucent black and has a couple of changes.

Gone is the Brightness slider but instead we have Highlights and Shadows controls for precise tweaking, and also a Reduce Noise slider. As before, iPhoto's image editing tools are very good and more than capable of adding a professional sheen to your snaps.

Two very welcome new additions are the Copy and Paste buttons on the Adjust window, meaning once you've got the look of an edit just right you can quickly apply the same settings to other pictures. Finally, there's a Straighten control for ironing out the angle of a picture.

iPhoto '08 is able to publish Events and images directly to the new .Mac Web Gallery and you can specify privacy settings as well as letting visitors upload and download pictures from your set.

Other improvements include the ability to hide pictures without deleting them and print with new themes. Overall it's very snappy to use, and Events make cataloguing and organising much more intuitive than before.

iMovie

The biggest change in iLife '08 is iMovie. In fact it's a completely new program built from the ground up, and it looks and feels totally different to previous versions. There's no longer a traditional timeline, but instead a canvas where you drop clips to make a movie.

All the video you capture is accessible from a central video library and, like iPhoto, is organised by Events for easier searching. Once you have captured or imported video to a new event, it appears in a sort of project bin.

iMovie '08 treats video very differently and uses the skimming technology found in iPhoto but takes it to a new level. When you mouse over video clips, the mouse 'scrubs' along the clip, playing it back so there's no waiting and no loading. It's blisteringly quick and revolutionises the way you preview clips. To select part of a clip to add to your main movie, you now draw around a section of it with a yellow box, then

drop that box into the movie. Unlike before, it doesn't disappear from the project bin. All that happens is an orange marker is applied, showing that section has been used. You can zoom in and out on all clips to display thumbnails, each of which plays as you scroll over it. It's really nifty and makes the old way of doing things seem medieval by comparison.

Once clips are in the movie window you can split and trim them using the same yellow box tool, and also drop in transitions. Unfortunately now you have to set a single default duration for transitions in the Preferences - you can no longer edit the duration of each one.

On the other hand, there's no rendering. Drop a transition on and it's viewable instantly. The same is true of titles, which can be previewed without rendering. Thankfully, their durations are editable by dragging and they can be moved and edited easily.

Fans of the lightning and earthquake effects from iMovie will be sorry to learn that there are no more video effects - they've gone. Instead, there's a Video Adjustment tool available to alter levels, exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation and white point. Much the same in fact as in iPhoto, only strangely without the new copy and paste function found there.

Out with the old...

Gone too is the Magic iMovie feature, though on the flipside there's support for numerous new formats including cameras that use flash memory. Certain things remain, such as the voiceover tool and integration with iTunes, iPhoto and Photo Booth libraries for easy drag and drop.

There's also a quick Audio Adjust control to boost the volume of selected clips, though in this new workspace there is no longer an audio track as such.

Video and sound are shown as a single block and are impossible to separate. If you drop a music file into a project it is displayed as an area of green surrounding the video. By double-clicking on it you can alter its duration, but not much else.

This is reflective of the general direction that Apple seems to have taken with iMovie now. It's easier to use but the tradeoff is that you lose some features, like audio tracks and video effects. Rather than feeling like a stripped down professional program, it seems more like a determinedly consumer product.

This is great news for many users because the new design does away with most of iMovie's old inconsistencies and you certainly can't fault its speed. Even on a MacBook, it's blazing.

The biggest fault is that you can't open your old iMovie projects in iMovie '08, but Apple has provided a free version of iMovie HD 6 for iLife '08 owners, for those who prefer it. If you upgrade from iLife '06, the old iMovie HD 6 program will still be in your Applications folder.

iMovie's Share menu now lets you publish your movie straight to the new .Mac Web Gallery or to your YouTube account. No exporting or converting, do it all from iMovie. To remove media from iTunes, .Mac or YouTube, use the Remove option in the Share menu.

iWeb

The newest member of the iLife family gets some interesting new features, though nothing really huge. Web widgets let you add YouTube videos, stock tickers, weather reports or other embeddable snippets from other sites, and there's smooth integration of Google Maps and AdSense content.

There are new, customisable photo album pages and themes, and direct publishing to .Mac and integration with iPhoto. The built-in image adjust tools are handy, and the inspector window makes changing properties a breeze.

You can now set up your personal domain and publish iWeb sites to it, though this involves fiddling with your domain settings. We're not really sure why iWeb still doesn't include the ability to FTP material - it seems like an obvious solution.

GarageBand

GarageBand is another program to get only small changes. The most obvious is the Magic GarageBand feature, which lets you choose a style and a few instruments then essentially writes a backing track for you to play or sing over. It's fun for the begininer but gets tired quickly.

Of more interest are arrangements - defining verse, chorus and so on - and multi-take recordings. Here, you set up a loop and record several passes, then choose the best.

Unfortunately you are forced to choose one and can't separate off the others, so if you have done two good but different takes, you have to duplicate the track and choose one take on each track, which is tiresome.

Other features like visual EQ and some automation will help the more advanced user, and GarageBand remains an excellent composition and podcasting tool.

iDVD

iDVD tends not to be radically overhauled, and here again there's not too much that's revolutionary. There are ten new animated themes, better customisation of menus and a new button library as well as great integration with all your media libraries and full drag and drop of movies, pictures and sound.

The themes are glossy and slick and the whole program is a doddle to use. The most important changes are under the hood, with much snappier overall performance, background encoding and switchable quality settings.

As a whole...

As a suite of tools in its own right, iLife is a triumph of usability, power and function. The integration between the programs and with .Mac is seamless, and on all but the slowest Macs, performance is faster than before. iMovie's new interface will take some getting used to and in many ways it's now a more entry-level application than it was before.

The new Events and skimming ideas implemented in iMovie and iPhoto do make searching, organising and previewing much quicker and more intuitive. If you are considering upgrading from iLife '06, though, it's a tougher call. iMovie is easier than before but also less flexible.

iPhoto's new features are ideal for those with large collections, but less essential for others. And the remaining three programs feature some nice tweaks and minor additions, but probably nothing you couldn't live without as an '06 owner.

That said, if any of the features on offer are ones that you've been crying out for, it is a small investment for a suite of tools which, let's not forget, will be guaranteed to work with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard when it finally gets released.

Score

• 4 / 5

For

• Much better management with Events
• iMovie '08 is very quick and easy to use
• .Mac Web Gallery integration

Against

• No video effects in iMovie '08 any more
• Can't open iMovie HD 6 files
• .Mac required to get full benefit

Verdict

Specification