PRODUCT REVIEW
It's a Wonderful - and Disturbing - iLife

Whether you use iLife or not -- and there are millions of PC users who never will -- Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) digital lifestyle suite will affect what you do and how you do it on your computer in the future. That's because iLife has always been a hothouse for ideas that influence the entire computer industry.

In iLife '08, the latest version of the software, Apple has revamped the suite in some exciting and, for some users, disturbing ways.

Making Memories

In the suite's photo handling program, iPhoto, a major effort was made to improve the application's navigation and organization. For example, the program automatically groups photos imported into it into what it calls "events."

How are events defined? Initially, they're created by date, but that can be altered within the program.

A new feature added to iPhoto is "skimming." It's a rapid way to view images within an event. You place your cursor at the bottom of a thumbnail for an event, and by moving it left or right, thumbnails of photos within the event are displayed.

In addition to events, you can create albums. Albums allow you to organize a group of photos in a non-chronological way.

You can also create "smart albums." They permit you to define a set of conditions, and any photo that meets those conditions will be automatically incorporated into the album. Conditions include description, event, keyword, title and filename, as well as camera-specific features such as aperture, model, shutter speed, flash and ISO.

Apple has also tweaked the editing tools in this version of iPhoto. They include shadow and highlight controls, edge sharpening and noise reduction and white balance adjustment.

One Thumb Down for iMovie

Apple's video editing application, iMovie, has undergone a radical makeover -- one that iMovie diehards may find disconcerting.

Gone is the timeline view. It's been replaced with a sort of modified storyboard view. Although this new arrangement is aimed at speeding up the process of making videos, it's a lot less intuitive than Apple would like us to believe. Even iMovie vets will at times feel as if they're learning a new program from scratch.

What's more, the software isn't completely compatible with previous versions of iMovie. When I imported a project I'd been working on in the previous version of the program, my titles and music were stripped from the project. That's probably why the new iMovie doesn't remove the old version of the program from a machine if it finds it there.

And One Thumb Up

Nevertheless, there are some nice additions to this version of iMovie.

As in iPhoto, clips can be skimmed. By dragging your cursor on a clip, you can play it forwards and backwards. The result is a smooth and swift way to view and edit clips.

Rather than making you save projects manually, the new iMovie automatically files projects in new Project Libraries. This can be initially confusing because most software requests that you save a project before leaving it.

Not only can video be trimmed in the new iMovie, but it can be cropped, and elements such as brightness, contrast and saturation can be altered.

Panning and zooming, or "Ken Burn effects," of photos in a project have also been improved through the use of what the application calls"keyframes." They give video makers better control of the effect by giving them a better visual representation of it than in prior versions of iMovie.

Apple has also improved the performance of this version of iMovie so tasks like adding titles, transitions, panning and zooming are done instantly without delays due to rendering.

More Muscle

In fact, I noticed an improvement in the performance of all the applications in the suite.

Apple has also tweaked the other applications in the suite.

In iWeb, its Web site creation package, it has added more design and layout tools, as well as support for personal domain names.

In GarageBand, its audio editing and music creation program, it has added printing of musical notation, as well as a neat feature called Magic GarageBand for automating song composition.

In iDVD, its DVD creation application, it has added new themes and animated menus and beefed up slideshow creation.

This latest release of iLife has some dazzling improvements, but it has lost, especially with the new iMovie, some of the intuitive ease of prior versions. Nevertheless, iLife '08 will reinforce Apple's position as a leader in digital lifestyle applications.