iLife '09
by Apple Computer
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Software Reviews of iLife '09
Customer Review: Great entry level apple apps
Summary: 4 Stars
iLife is a collection of fun and useful apps. I would call them toys because they are fun, but they are much more powerful and useful than that.
iPhoto - great for organizing your photos and videos. Face detection is lots of fun. Several basic enhancement tools are included that eliminate much of my need for Photoshop. Now I just spin up GIMP when my needs go beyond what iPhoto can offer.
iMovie - I haven't used iMovie 09 much, but older versions of iMovie were great for building simple videos out of DV footage and still images.
iDVD - I haven't used the latest version of iDVD yet, but it has always been a great app for mastering simple DVD content.
GarageBand - Amazing musical toy. Very serious musicians will probably find GarageBand too limited, but it is lots of fun for people who are casually interested in making music. You get plenty of loops and sounds to throw together your own tracks. MIDI support is limited, but it is a very fun environment to play around in. Logic 9 will give you far more power if you feel constrained by GarageBand.
Update - If you got iLife with your new mac, be sure to drop in the DVD and install the extra GarageBand instruments and loops. A lot of great creative content is included.
Customer Review: ILife09
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a new Mac user and have been learning about all of its programs. What I've seen of iLife has been fantastic. When I learned of the changes from 08 to 09, I had to have it. It's a great program. Amazon delivered it very quickly and reliably.Customer Review: Well Worth The Money
Summary: 5 Stars
Well worth the money, as you will need this for the Snow Leopard Up-Date in Sept.Customer Review: Glaring bugs tarnish glossy product.
Summary: 1 Stars
I work with many users, so I see patterns in the problems I see people have using common applications such as iLife.
iWeb:
Fundamentally flawed. It is essential for just about every website that it follow google's Webmaster guidelines. Web sites created with iWeb do not, in a way that causes google to not include iWeb-generated sites in its search results. This means most people searching for your site won't find it if you simply created it in iWeb and put it on the Web. (You can use third party tools to fix the problem, but first you have to know about it, and then you have to know about the third party tools - which means that most Web sites created with iWeb won't be indexed by google.)
[...]
The very first guideline:
Design and content guideline
#1: Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
In iWeb, none of the pages are reachable via static text links. Instead, they are all reachable via a javascript menu that google does not understand.
Why hasn't Apple fixed this bug? It's been around a long time; I can only assume that they consider it a Google bug and refuse to fix it on their end.
Web site developers who realize that their site is not being indexed but don't know that it's because of this bug may try various tricks that result in further violation of Google's website guidelines.
They may create a static page in order to provide static links in a desperate effort to fix the problem, and provide a hidden link to it from the main page. In so doing, they will violate another Google guideline:
# Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
In a desperate effort to fix the problem they may violate another Google guideline:
# Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold(tm) that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
This is a serious bug, in my book.
iPhoto: Great application.
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It could really help if it had better features for consolidating all a user's images. The option to copy images added is helpful, but it needs to be better at dealing with and deleting duplicate images where appropriate, not just in the Pictures folder, but elsewhere on the computer's hard drive(s). It needs to be better at not crashing when users delete content (e.g. large movies) with the Finder, making its content index inaccurate. It needs a better metadata database, so that it doesn't slow to a crawl when a user has many photos.
iMovie:
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Other reviewers have covered this app really well already, e.g. H. Murchison, whose experience matches mine.
Garage Band:
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I don't have feedback from users on this app. I wanted to record some audio once and gave up with GB; I got, installed and used Audacity.
Customer Review: Good updates, may or may not be worth the price
Summary: 4 Stars
I love the updates in iphot0 that do geotagging either by automatic download if your camera is capable or by manuel insertion if not. You can always definately remember where a picture was taken.
The faces feature is also cool too. It does take some time for the computer to learn but it does a very good job. I love being able to look up someone's name and instantly see the pictures that i have of that person on the computer.
iphoto also updated its editing feature.
I have played a little with imovie but not enough to really comment on the differences.
Is it worth the price? For me, only because i use iphoto for all of my photos. If it weren't for that, it wouldn't be worth the price. the other thing i wonder is will there be an ilife '10 and is it better to wait on that? It is certainly a delimma, but in the end, i chose ilife 09 because of the faces feature, better editing features and geotagging.