While the trend for a mix of Web 2.0 functionality and User Generated Content (UGC) continues Apple are making the smooth transition into digital lifestyle their priority for the Mac home user with iLife ’08.
Apple’s updated software suite is designed to make it easier to completely digitise your life, with more powerful functions for everything from editing home movies to adding Google Maps and other widgets to your blog or homepage.
The iLife suite consists of six applications: iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD, GarageBand and the .Mac web gallery.
IMovies now enables the user to publish movies directly to YouTube or send to iTunes so footage can be watched easily from Apple TV or the iPod.
Cashing in on Google AdWords is made easier through website creation program iWeb, through which users can sign up for an AdWords account and immediately begin placing this as well as Google Maps applications on their site in a drag and drop manner without any knowledge of coding needed.
The .Mac Web Gallery is much like Flickr or Photobucket, in that photos can be displayed and shared online. Friends can subscribe to your online album so that when you update, the albums on their computer update automatically too.
Because the majority of someone’s digital photos life live on their laptop or desktop, Apple has tweaked iPhoto to help automatically sort through the thousands of pictures that might be stored in one huge folder.
The application now sorts photos by event, relying on the fact that most groups of photos are centred around a birthday, holiday, or similar occasion instead of the user having to manually create and maintain individual albums. GarageBand has a brand new feature called Magic GarageBand that lets the budding musician get inspiration using a virtual backing band. By picking the different instruments and musical styles and genres for your band members inside the program you can have a jazz or metal band jam with you.
There is much functionality added in all of these programmes to take advantage of the multimedia abilities of the iPhone but European users will have to wait a while before testing it out.
By Marie Boran
