iLife '09 Family Pack
by Apple Computer
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Software Reviews of iLife '09 Family Pack
Customer Review: Incredibly Good Software Suite! Great Value! Family Friendly!
Summary: 5 Stars
I really don't understand why there are any bad reviews here. iLife 09' is an incredibly great value. You get so much functionality for such a little price. Yes, maybe the face recognition thing in iPhoto is a little buggy, but that is why companies have rolling updates. Apple constantly listens to their customers, (What a novel idea!), and values their input. The net result is that each version of the software continues to get better and better. I challenge those angry Windows users who habitually post unsubstantiated reviews on Mac Products to show me a Windows based product that took the step to create facial recognition. Windows based products continue to be devoid of any innovation. Why do you think Microsoft continues to try and emulate the Mac OSX and iLife Suite! I highly recommend the iLife 09 software to any individual or family who is looking for an easy to use, easy to learn, non-intimidating product!Customer Review: Great
Summary: 5 Stars
Great suite of products - not many major changes but iMovie & iPhoto have definitely been improved!Customer Review: Ok let's try a real review here
Summary: 4 Stars
I think the purpose for a review is to get a sense for the product being reviewd. Unfortunately user submitted online reviews can and do end up becoming bully pulpits where people who feel slighted launch invective towards a product. Let me say that this will not be that type of review. It is abominably long however so pick and choose which apps you think are the most important to you.
I own a Mac mini 1.66Ghz Core Duo with 2GB of RAM that shipped with iLife 06 (I skipped the 08 upgrade) . Even by the standards of 2007 it wasn't a barn burner. I have become aquainted with iLife 09 (hereafter IL9) and here are my thoughts.
iMovie 09 (IM9) - This is the second version of what has become a hot button issue for many users. My computer shipped with iMovie 06 aka iMovie HD and I have tried to edit some video in it. The anger comes from the fact that Apple scrapped iMovie HD for new application called iMovie 08. The problem was that iMovie 08 was such a radical departure from iMovie HD and it had much less features. The uproar was so loud Apple capitulated and allowed iMovie HD to be downloaded separately. Now we have the second generation of this new movie editing application and the iMovie HD fans are back with a vengeance but are they justified again? I do not believe so and here's why.
Apple switched to a whole new video app for reasons that we can only guess but I'd surmise that they felt that iMovie HD had grown too complex with plugins and time lines and audio editing features that are truly best served in a higher end application like Final Cut Express. They decided to go back to the roots. iMovie 08 would be a video app for people that only need to edit every now an then or total newbies.
They have succeeded. iMovie '09 rectify's most of the issues i've seen that actually hampered the ability to edit video easily. It supports chapter markers for easy DVD creation in iDVD. The audio editing is improved (you can keep just the audio from a clip or just the video easily). The speed of this app is superb. Where as you had to render some effects and whatnot in iMovie HD in IM9 almost everything happens in realtime. I found this kept me in a creative mode where I could try out different titles or transitions very quickly and find something I liked. Here's a feature that you're going to love and use. Apple has taken a feature from their pro video software that analyzes your video and then takes a majority of the camera shake out. It really works provided your were shaking the camera like a tambourine. This feature alone will save those shots that you thought you lost because your hand was unsteady. It does require some hefty processing so it's one of the features that isn't "instant" and you can control how much shake gets removed. You can now edit with precision and you have many more editing choices. Want picture in picture? It's easy. Editing in iMovie 09 is basically dragging clips around and choosing the ideal text and transition. The new templates are very nice and of course integration with your iTunes music, and your iPhoto pictures is a sidebar away. I'd like to see Apple re-implement plugins because 3rd party developers can do amazing things and I want them to but for now iMovie 09 is likely going to be a nice app for tossing together something appealing.
iPhoto - Is certainly not as much of a hot button issue. The new iPhoto makes a big deal out of Faces and Places. With Faces you are supposed to be able to tag your friends and family and the software looks for facial features and groups them together. In practice I've found this to be rather iffy. It works well if you've framed someone's face in a good straight on shot but it can get lost with more obscure photos. Surprisingly it does work on some pets. I imagine that it will improve over time but honestly even a human sometimes can err in doing the same task. Places is a godsend for those who travel. It allows you to pinpoint where you were during a photo via your longitude and latitude co-ordinates. Now there are cameras that will put this information right into the metadata of the photo you take but they are still pretty rare. I expect that in a couple of years all but the most inexpensive cameras will do Geo tagging. Fear not! You can manually tag your photos in bunches. That Greece trip you took last summer is easy to tag. Once you've accumulated your geo tagging data you can view a Google Earth map right from within iPhoto and there are pinpoint detailing everywhere you've taken photos. At any time you can double click a pinpoint and the photos assigned to that location are displayed. This is yet another way to look at your photos! Here's another feature ...if you use Facebook you can upload photos right from within iPhoto. Facebook fans are always adding tag info to their friends photos. If you upload say a photo of you and other people to Facebook and someone tags their their photo, iPhoto will sync that tag information back to your library. There's more to iPhoto but these are some of the salient features. My wish is that the Flickr export options grow to have more controls and I'd love to see iPhoto find a way to edit image files without creating a copy.
iWeb - You know you want to make your own website or blog. iWeb is Apple's easy web page application. It's first two versions only allowed you to use it with .Mac (now MobileMe) that's changed now. iWeb supports FTP which means you can use it to create a web page for just about any web service provider. It comes with some handly drag n drop widgets that allow you to add an RSS feed or countdown or html snippet. IMO it's worthy of usage by people who don't have MobileMe accounts. Also they've modified it so that you don't have to publish the whole page for just a few changes which saves time by not sending a bunch of superfluous data. It's not an earth shaking update but we're on the right road here now.
GarageBand- this is a very misunderstood app. Many people feel it's an app for musicians and if they are not musically inclined they don't use it. Garage Band is a multifaceted tool. Not only can you play music into it via a midi keyboard or guitar (through an interface) but it comes with a huge collection of Apple Loops. These loops are smart. You can drag these audio building blocks to create tracks that always follow the same musical key and timing "automagically". I have no piano or guitar but i'm able to use GarageBand to provide music or sound effects for my video and if I had a microphone I'd be able to create audio or video podcasts. The new features in GB are built in training. If you want to learn piano or guitar there are 8 free lessons that you can download. These include video tutorials that allow you to play along and even record yourself. You get to see fingerings and slow the music down to grasp the licks. If these can spur even one hundred people to pick up an instrument it will have been well worth it. You can even download Artist series videos for $5. You want Norah Jones to teach you a little piano? Not a problem. If you're a guitar player then GB has you grinning from ear to ear. Apple has reworked the guitar simulations and GB can turn your electric guitar into whatever you want via multiple amp simulation and stomp box simulations. I've heard from professional musicians that these effects and simulations are superior to Apples Pro music apps. I'm eyeballing an acoustic/electric for some fun. Even if you don't plan on learning an instrument GB can be an asset to you if you get curious.
iDVD- Sadly iDVD has not had any changes. Apple is no longer investing in what they feel is a format in the autumn of its existence as a distribution format for computers.
There are some caveats here. If you have a PowerPC processor there are going to be features that you don't have full access to. There will be slow downs. iLife 09 really wants an Intel processor and dual cores at that. If you have these requirements and hopefully more than 1GB of RAM I'd say you can get a lot of value out of iLife especially in this Family Pack bundle. Remember it is a consumer oriented package yet you will hear complaints about missing features that are best reserved for higher end packages. Rest assured in knowing that GarageBand files upgrade to Logic and iPhoto information upgrades to Aperture. Apple generally builds bridges to the next step up application.
Don't let anyone tell you what's important to you or what's worth buying. I'm still learning new things about iLife every day. It is far from mediocre in my opinion.
Customer Review: Still missing key organizing features.
Summary: 1 Stars
iPhoto has a long ways to go before becoming a great organizer. Events seemed like a great idea when they were released in iPhoto 08 but the trouble with them is that you can't put events inside of other events. The reason this is such a problem is that after you load so many thousands of photographs there becomes to many events and it becomes cumbersome to sludge through them all.
Their solution to this problem in 08 was the add the ability to merge events together. When this happens everything becomes one large event, it doesn't maintain the groups of the events you merge together. I guess I can forgive them not totally thinking this feature though in iPhoto 08 but nearly a year and a half later they should have got this right by now. Adding events inside of events is a lot more important than even features like faces and places.
Doing a search is also limiting from the search box. You can't set multiple search criteria at a time like in the Finder or Adobe Bridge. In other words I can't say show me the files with these keywords that were taken during this time period and have this rating. I can only do one at a time. Yes I can do this with a smart folder but I would like to have option not to since I don't always want to come back to the search later.
Posting to Facebook and Flickr only gives you access to some of the features on those sites. You can't enter in all the information about the pictures from directly with in iPhoto (captions for photos, who can see the pictures, what should be the key photograph for an album etc.) Also iPhoto doesn't pull the previous albums you created back in to iPhoto so you can only view some of your albums not all of them.
If you ever have to move your information to a new hard drive down the road all the work you did to put together slide shows won't come across with the rest of the photos. I found this out the hard way as a spent a lot of time setting up manual Ken Burns effects so that they would pan from one particular area of a photograph to another. Now the only way a can access them is to boot back and forth between my old hard drive. It is a good thing I happen to have two drives in my machine or I would have to recreate them. I imagine this is what you would have to do if you had a laptop.
The recent area on the sidebar only shows the last event you look at. This is ok but I would like to see a history of the last several events I viewed. The last 12 months area doesn't organize those photos by events so you just gets this massive number of photos which isn't very convenient.
Customer Review: iMovie09 will kill your installation of imovie HD! The rest of the programs are ho-hum
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this for one reason and one reason only: the hope that iMovie had been fixed from the 2008 version to be more like the 2006 version. Didn't happen. iMovie is now worse than ever. Editing audio files is probably the most frustrating thing I've tried in a while. The interface is not designed well, and I found myself looking for features that used to be there (fade out video effect in conjunction with audio fade out) thinking they've got got to be there somewhere, and then finding out that they simply don't exist.
IMPORTANT: If you install iMovie 09, it will make your existing install of iMovie HD UNUSABLE. You CANNOT keep your old installation of iMovie 06HD when you install iMovie 09! This is amazingly frustrating, especially sine iMovie 09 will not open iMovie 06 video files!
I honestly think they don't want to make iMovie 09 work the way it should to force people to buy the much more expensive Final Cut, even if you don't need all of the features of a full video editing software. Working with HD video in iMovie is a joke; it lags, stutters, and crashes for no apparent reason.
iPhoto is fine, but the new features are not that impressive. The face recognition would be awesome if it worked well, but it doesn't. It wanted to group my grandmother and my sister together (I guess there is a little family resemblance there). The GPS feature is awesome if you have a GPS enabled camera, but if you have a camera that nice you're probably using a proffesional image editing software. Eventually (next 2-3 years) as consumer cameras start to have built in GPS, this feature will be valuable, so I guess you could say iPhoto is ahead of its time.
Garage Band works like it should, but there aren't any improvements that make it worth upgrading. The much flaunted lessons must be bought and downloaded, they don't come with the software. It is useful certainly, but I just don't see anything that makes me believe upgrading is worth it.
Frankly, this is just another ho-hum release. You don't need to upgrade unless you just have to have GPS photo tracking or face recognition software. If you were hoping (like me) that iMovie would be more robust, think again. It would have been very easy for Apple to include two versions of iMovie: advanced and basic. Basic would be the default setting and advanced would include the features lost from the 06 version. It could be turned on or off for the best of both worlds. Instead I have iMovie HD installed on top of iLife 09. Waste of hard drive space.
iLife 09 doesn't offer any compelling reason to update if you have iLife 08. There aren't any improvement that are not relatively minor or obscure (face recognition for example). And there is one MASSIVE disadvatage, at least for those who prefer iMovie 06: installing iMovie 09 will cause iMovie 06 to become inoperable! You have no choice in the matter, and no prompt lets you know that you are losing iMovie HD by installing iLife 09. It just happens.
Why Apple doesn't allow the user to control how many or few features are available is beyond me. I'm not saying everyone should want all the features from iMovie 06, but for those of us that do, why not make them available? This sort of 'one size fits all' approach is really frustrating.