iLife ’11: Significant iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand updates
Apple has introduced $49 upgrade pricing and baked some significant new features into the digital life suite. All of the features — I’m really looking forward to the improved piano and guitar lessons — are going to take months to fully grok, but here are the bullet points.
The mothership has announced the immediately availability of iLife ’11 ($49). Though I haven’t laid hands on it yet, given our past experience with Snow Leopard, which also sold as a $29 upgrade, iLife ’11 likely will also offer a full install rather than an actual disk swapping upgrade process like everyone else pushes on people.
“iLife is widely regarded as the best suite of digital life applications in the world, and iLife ’11 makes them even better,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iLife now makes it easier than ever to create books and letterpress cards, make amazing movie trailers from your personal videos and post them online, and make your band sound far better or teach yourself piano or guitar.”
Whereas Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will integrate the Mac and idevice universes more tightly, we’re already seeing the fruits of those labors in iLife ’11. The big thing here being look and feel vis-a-vis fullscreen mode.
- iPhoto ’11
• Easier to email photos
— templates that automatically populate photos
— no need to leave iPhoto
— Sharing panel (auto Flickr, Facebook sharing) and auto-populated friend comments
• New slideshows
— New themes/templates
• Big leap in books
— Printing over 2-million books per year
— Book carousel for selecting templates, which automatically populate w/ photos
— Create book delivers editable layout
— Drag and drop page reordering
— Project view (holds all books, cards)
• Adding letter press (greeting) cards, which are beautiful
iMovie ’11
• All new audio editing: “The number one request we got since the last version is better audio editing,” said Jobs
— Live edits, segment editing
— audio effects
• One step effects
— kenburns, instant replay, etc.
— scrubbing is really impressive
• People finder
— face detection
• News and sports themes
• Trailer creation feature
— nifty templates w/ credits, music scores (london symphony orchestra)
• 24fps now available
• Vimeo, Facebook, YouTube sharing
GarageBand ’11
• Flex Time — lets you move, stretch or shorten individual notes
• Groove Matching
— an automatic spell checker for bad rhythm
• More guitar amps & effects
• New piano and guitar lessons (how did I play feature)
— Real-time feedback on how you’re playing
— mistaken notes and timing
— history view of you’re learning
The audio editing feature in iMovie is long, long overdue and the other features therein look really fun. The changes in iPhoto are nice (i.e. integrated email), but don’t appear to be earthshaking.
The new editing/correction features in GarageBand amount to autotune for instruments. Unfortunately, for a lot people, Flex Time and Groove Matching are probably gonna make lazy people even lazier — just practice more, please?
All of features and demos look amazing — hey, it was Steve Jobs and Apple doing the dog n’ pony. Thereupon, I can’t shoot photos or videos that well both because I have neither the skills nor gear. Moreover, my friends and family aren’t that cool, and my gear isn’t.
