Apple iLife ‘09

Apple is getting ready for the launch of ‘Snow Leopard’, the latest big

update to its OS X operating system (the Mac alternative to Microsoft Windows),

but it has also been busy with some of its other software products recently.

All Macs are sold with Apple’s iLife suite installed, but the collection,

which includes applications such as iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband, is also

updated every year. The new ’09 edition brings some impressive new features to

those programs.We weren’t big fans of the ’08 version of the iMovie video-editor, but iMovie

’09 is a definite improvement. One of the most useful new options is the

advanced-drag-and-drop feature. When you select a video clip with the mouse it

can be dropped on top of another clip and a menu will appear that enables the

user to quickly combine the two in a number of ways.

One would be to simply replace the first clip with the second, or the second

clip could be inserted into the middle of the first, or superimposed on top of

the first clip to create a picture-in-picture effect. There’s also a new

Precision Editor that allows users to fine-tune the transitions between clips

more accurately than before.The iPhoto photo-organiser gets a big upgrade too. The big improvement here

is the Faces option, which uses face-recognition technology to identify people

in your photos. Just select a photo of a particular person and click the Name

button to add their name to that photo.The program will then scan your entire collection of photos to see if it can

find other pictures of the same person and then it will group them together

automatically. There’s also a Places option that allows GPS location data to be

added to photos which can then be linked to a map. User can then browse photos

by region by clicking on the map.The Garageband music software has been given a more modest upgrade, although

it does now include some very slick guitar and piano lessons for beginners.We can recommend iLife ’09 to any Mac user who already uses iPhoto and iMovie

to organise photos or videos.

Taken from here