iRamble as iWait for iLife to iNstall
I made another visit to the Apple Store SOHO tonight. The purpose of this trip was to pick up a copy of the new iLife, a completely unnecessary purchase I nonetheless made for the third year in a row.
Why did I buy the software? Because I use iPhoto quite a bit and I’d hate to think there could be some really cool feature I don’t have, regardless of whether or not it’s useful. Is it worth $79.99 plus tax? Ask someone else. I can live with myself.
So I bought the software and I’m sitting at Starbucks waiting for it to install. It takes over 5 GB of drive space (that’s after I unchecked some of the extraneous GarageBand content) and about 30 minutes to install, so I’m passing the time with this blog post.
Like I said, the only iApp I use with any amount of regularity is iPhoto. Walt Mossberg isn’t kidding when he says there’s no comparable photo manager on Windows, though I recently set up my Mom with the (free) Photoshop Album and thought it was at least a step forward for Windows. The searching functionality is already sweet (both within iPhoto and via Spotlight), and the new “photo podcasting” functionality that uses RSS sounds intriguing. I’m going to experiment with it on this blog as I begin posting more photos. I’ll be evaluating it against the FAlbum/Flickr combination, which is set up but is in the process of getting some tweaking.
iMovie is an impressive app, but once I’d spent more than about 20 hours on digital video projects I decided my time would be better spent on a pseudo-pro tool, so I moved to Final Cut Express about 18 months back.
Final Cut Express is great. Strangely, I’ve been disciplined enough not to upgrade to the HD version, because there doesn’t seem to be any compelling (or usable—I don’t have an HD camcorder) new features.
Digital video is something else I’d like to experiment with on this blog, but for me it’s really a solution in search of a problem at this point. I’ll probably put out some test video posts in the reasonably near future, though, some done via the iMovie video podcasting functionality (which I assume means the posts will be in QuickTime format) and some using Flash video. Flash video makes more sense to me than QuickTime—I hate video player browser plug-ins.
I’d be really happy if iWeb is a nice, simple, GUI-based Web page editor that will allow me to do simple CSS-based pages from scratch. My own intuition and the brief write-ups I’ve read lead me to believe iWeb will be a template-based app I’ll launch about twice. I don’t think I’m the target market.
The new GarageBand sounds great for anyone who wants to mix their own tunes and/or do podcasts. Good luck to anyone who plans to do this.
(About 30 minutes later…)
iLife ’06 is installed.
Full screen editing and side-by-side photo comparisons (for up to eight pictures) is the nonessential iPhoto feature I’d hate not to have. I’ll post on the photocasting once I have a chance to play with it.
iMovie is much more feature-rich than I remember. Of course, the last version I used was at least two revs back. I can see myself using it for simple video projects, because for basic tasks the UI seems more efficient than FCE’s. I’ll probably post some test video podcasts in the near future.
(Side note: Does iMovie support non-destructive nonlinear editing? If I recall correctly Apple implemented that a version or two back.)
iWeb is pretty much as I expected—pretty, easy to use, and completely useless to me. I can see it being useful for non-techies, though.
No comment on iDVD until I need to build a DVD.
I respect Apple’s strategy. Their tools make Web publishing, photo sharing, podcasting, movie making and other digital lifestyle essentials a piece of cake. The slick tools tie people to the Mac OS and reward people for bringing friends and family to the platform, and .Mac subscriptions provide for a nice recurring revenue stream.
I wish the slick tools were more useful to me personally, but if I were in Apple’s shoes I probably wouldn’t cater to my picky technical preferences, either.
I haven’t launched GarageBand. Happy audio podcasting, other people.