Review: iLife 06

[Magnus]

iLife 06 was introduced in January by Steve Jobs at MacWorld Expo and it should now be available in the UAE. IMC Apple Middle East provided a copy to EmiratesMac and we have now had a chance to try it out for a while.

Installation
iLife 06 comes on a double-sided DVD, summing up to almost 8Gb. That's a whopper of a suite, I would say. Installed fully it measures up to around 7.5Gb but you can trim it by doing a customized install. By opting out of Garageband and accompanying sounds and jingles you can chop off over 3Gb from the total.

One thing that irritated me right away with iLife is that it adds six icons to your dock, one for each of the iLife apps, and it doesn't even ask you if you want to do that or not. That's not good Apple. All you had to do was put up a little dialog asking me if I wanted to add the icons or not.

iPhoto
The best-known and most-often-used app in the iLife suit besides iTunes is arguably iPhoto. iPhoto has kept developing nicely up through versions and iPhoto 06 is a very nice step up in functionality. Performance has increased; it's faster and you can have more photos in the library.

To try out iPhoto I went out and shot a 1Gb compact flash card full of photos with my Nikon D70s. I shot in RAW format (Nikon's NEF) which mean I ended up with 188 shots on the card. I imported these to iPhoto which took almost 15 minutes. This worried me a bit but I must say performance has been a positive surprise. I tested iLife on a Mac mini 1.42GHz with 1Gb RAM and booting off of the internal 80Gb notebook hard drive. This should be a fairly common setup among readers of this site, I would think.

Probably what I like most about the new iPhoto is the new fullscreen editing mode and the new effects and adjustment features. The fullscreen editing mode makes it much easier to go through a lot of shots, see which ones are good or not, touch them up some, and even make pretty advanced adjustments. There's a Levels-adjustments a la Photoshop, and there are a number of other adjustment-options including sharpness, brightness and contrast. This should be more than most home users would need from a digital photography application and iPhoto does it beautifully. Apple sometimes uses similar features in several applications and the Effects panel bears a strong resemblance to the one found in Photobooth, both in form and function. It shows you small thumbnails of eight different effects and you can apply them repeatedly or reset just by a few clicks of the mouse.

iPhoto 06 is a very nice program with some amazing new features. I was hoping for some new functionality in terms of managing multiple iPhoto libraries and backing up, but of that there was none. You're still really stuck with libraries no larger than your largest backup media. So if you have a DVD burner you shouldn't make your libraries larger than around 4.3Gb so they can fit on a DVD. And with today's high-megapixel cameras it's so easy to fill up 4Gb.

iMovie
After iPhoto I've probably used iMovie the most in the iLife suite (again, not counting iTunes). What I've done mostly is to import from a DV camcorder, edit, and output to movie DVDs to share with friends and family, and I think that's about the same as for most iMovie users. As with Garageband, and we get to that app in a little bit, the main news in iMovie is the support for podcasts, and in the case of iMovie it's of course video podcasts.

Besides the podcast support, the news in iMovie that's going to affect most users is the iMovie themes and the different kinds of effects included. The themes in iMovie work kind like you would expect; they are high-quality ready-made templates in which you drag and drop your content, add and edit text, and customize some aspects of the design. Apple's iMovie themes are great looking and they can make your home movies look like an award-winning professional production, straight out of Bollywood.

Whatever you make in iMovie can with a few clicks be turned into something you can podcast (videocast?) or make available from a web page with iWeb. This is dead easy to do but I think many users will want some more control over what happens. Arguably this has more to do with iWeb than iMovie and we'll get back to some of these issues further down.

iDVD
In line with iMovies themes and effects, iDVD have also received a facelift. The big news is probably that you can now create widescreen DVDs. Also big news for many users is the Magic iDVD function. You basically pick your movies, a theme, and iDVD will put together a DVD, complete with menus and everything. Again Apple creates something "for the rest of us".

Garageband
I can honestly say that although I haven't used Garageband much it's a very fun application to play around with. The big news for Garageband is obviously the podcast support. Apple didn't invent podcasting but they made it big by building podcast support in their iTunes music player. Some would say Apple has done it again by making it easier than before to produce professional-sounding audio podcasts and I would agree with that. I have already been in contact with some people who use the new Garageband for their podcasts and they sound amazingly good and they say it's so easy to work with. When you start Garageband you can select to create a new podcast project which sets up a new project with a skeleton podcast. You can then drag and drop artwork from your iPhoto library, record interviews with your friends and guests via iChat, add sound effects and jingles, and send it all to iWeb and even the iTunes Music Store when you're finished.

If you look at what's new in Garageband you cannot find much that is new besides the podcast support but perhaps that doesn't matter much. Garageband is still a very fun and capable application with which even someone who has zero musical talent - like myself - can create what sounds pretty professional pieces of music. You drag and drop different instruments to tracks on the screen, position them, add effects, etc. It's easy to operate and it's fun to see at least a glance at what the professionals do to compose their music.

iWeb
So last but not least we have the new addition to the iLife family, iWeb. I deal with it last because it ties together all the other iLife apps very nicely. To give you the conclusion first, I would say that iWeb is a very nice idea that feels a bit like a "1.0" release, and perhaps iWeb was a bit rushed to market, so to speak.

The whole idea of iWeb is to tie all the other iLife apps together so you can publish media on web sites. With iWeb you pick a theme for your web site and you create individual web pages based on templates. You can drag and drop media - movies, photos, and music - from the other iLife apps. That's basically what you do to create pretty good looking web sites, drag and drop, and replace text. You can create a blog, a photo album, a movie album, and more. The templates and themes are nice looking and very much in line with the other iLife apps. There's almost a certain "iLife look" that we've come to expect, for better or for worse.

That all sounds great, doesn't it? So what's not so great then? At least on my system, iWeb crashed too much to be acceptable. As users we know that software crash once in a while, but iWeb crashed two times when I tried to drop a photo into a template, and once when I tried to publish a site to a folder. Publish to .Mac didn't work at all, but that may be due to me having a bad network connection. I also experienced a few little interface-quirks that may be my system.

Update: I tested iWeb before the 1.0.1 update was released and perhaps the update fixed some of the issues I experienced.

Wrapping up
So should you go out and spend money on iLife 06 if you have a previous version? If you have iLife 05 it's a tough choice. I guess my answer would be if you're happy with the 05 version and you don't think you would need iWeb, then stick with it. But then again it's not that much money to get the brand new suite. There is no upgrade offer so you will have to pay the full price even if you have a previous version. Some argue this is unfair but I would say that iLife is a steal at the full price so it's not a big deal that there is no upgrade path. There's nothing else on PC or Mac that comes close to matching iLife in functionality and value, in my opinion. It's a great suite of applications and it's a must have for pretty much every Mac user.