PC Magazine - 2009 04.pdf - Libertad Zero - Blog

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Apple iLife ’09 $79 direct L l l l h Pros Five strong apps, tightly integrated. Terrific value. Connects to a variety of Web services. Cons iphoto competitors are nearly as good, at no cost. No update to iDVD, which has no Bluray support. awkward handling of multiple iMovies. Click here for more. apple iliFe ’09 22 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION april 2009 first looks software Your Digital Life, Apple Style iLife is still the best suite out there for combining your photos, videos, and audio doodlings into gorgeous projects to show friends and family. iLife ’09 isn’t really a huge upgrade from iLife ’08, and the rise of alternatives to a few of its apps means you may actually want to think twice before dropping $79. But if you intend to use all the pieces together, you’ll be spoiled for any other suite. Why? Because the strength of iLife is its integration. Each component, individually, is good. Together they’re unbeatable. Media flows effortlessly from one app to the other, letting you put your photos, movies, or songs into the hands of friends and family half a dozen ways. Five components make up iLife: iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD. The free download, iTunes, is pretty much the sixth part and is necessary if you want to take advantage of the suite’s integration. iWeb and iDVD exist mostly to let you publish material you collected or created in iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and iTunes. With iLife ’09, Apple has unyoked the software a bit from the $99a-year MobileMe online service, giving you more options to put your photos, videos, and Web sites online with Flickr, YouTube, and other hosting services—a welcome and much-needed move. For its tight integration and continued feature innovation, we award iLife ’09 an Editors’ Choice. Finding FaCes in the Crowd iphoto ’09’s best new feature is the ability to sort photos by who’s in them, known as “Faces.” iPhoto ’09 Once, iPhoto had no peer. But now Google’s free Picasa 3.0 has taken a lot of the wind out of iPhoto’s sails, matching the new face-detection and geotagging functions in iPhoto and one-upping it on speed. If you intend to print your photos or export them into iMovie, iPhoto is still the best choice. As before, iPhoto imports images into datebased collections called events, but you have two new photo-sorting capabilities: Faces and Places. The Faces feature scans through your photos identifying human faces and then asks you to tag them with names. With our 4,500-image library, the process took about 90 minutes. Places is striking but a little less useful. It lets you plot the locations where you took your photos on a Google Map, and zoom in to look at collections of images you shot in the same area. There are a few other enhancements, but they’re too minor to change your buying decision. If you’re just looking for a photo organizer and a way to put your slideshows on the Web, look to Picasa. But iPhoto still reigns for folks wanting to do more with their photos. iMovie ’09 iMovie ’09 keeps its predecessor’s radical clip-based interface but adds a bunch of missing features that
advanced users will welcome. For example, clicking on the corner of a clip gives you a list of advanced features, such as a frame-by-frame precision editor that helps—a little—with iMovie’s lack of timecodes and frame markings. Also, the new iMovie supports two video tracks—sort of. You can cut away to a second while playing the audio from the first, embed one track in another to create a picture-inpicture display, or do simple green-screen compositing. Like most of iMovie’s features, these could be more flexible. Two features that improve iMovie’s integration with iPhoto are Themes (to add titles and transitions) and Edit to Music (which lets you synchronize transitions with the beats or lyrics of a musical score—handy for customized slideshows). The application still lacks one big capability: HD support. While you can import HD movies from most video cameras, you can’t output in HD. If you’re using a Mac, though, iMovie is pretty much your only cheap video-editing option. garageBand ’09 It’s the fifth anniversary of GarageBand, and Apple seems to be taking a new approach to this recording app that is part toy, part tool. No one will ever confuse GarageBand with Pro Tools, and Apple seems to embrace the difference. In its latest iteration, GarageBand seems more of a learning tool than anything else. Sure, you can record some demos on it, with either real instruments or supplied samples, adding sounds and loops track by track. But Apple seems more concerned with showing you the fundamentals of simple composing, digital recording, and learning an instrument. It does the last through basic video lessons called “Learn to Play.” Non-celebrity lessons are free, but getting Norah Jones to teach you piano, for example, costs $4.99. The payoff is that Jones delivers a verse-by-verse how-to in panoramic widescreen. Underneath her video, the ivories she’s caressing light up on a virtual keyboard. Apple has also added virtual amps and pedals for guitarists to run their recordings through. The less-compelling change to GarageBand is a feature that lets you set up a band on a fake stage, choose the style of music and instruments, and put songs together. If you want basic music lessons and to get your feet wet with basic recording-and-looping software, GarageBand is worth your consideration. iweb ’09 iWeb has finally grown up and gotten more flexible. Apple’s easy-to-use, template-based Web site creator used to have one big downside: It could publish directly only to MobileMe. But now you can publish to any server that accepts FTP, which includes most Web hosts. You can also manage multiple sites, with each one uploaded to a different location. iWeb is still not an enterprise-class, or even a small-business-class, Web-design program. You can’t get at the basic HTML of your Web pages, and everything you do must be based on one of the iWeb’s 28 graphical themes and 8 page types. You can insert an “HTML snippet” as a widget, but it must play nice with Apple’s existing code. Other widgets let you drop in RSS feeds, a Google AdSense box, photos and videos from an iSight camera or YouTube, and, bizarrely, a graphical countdown. iWeb’s real function—like iDVD’s—seems to be to create showcases for your other iLife content, and the program does that admirably. idVd 7.0.3 There’s no upgrade to iDVD in iLife ’09. The upgrades come in iMovie, which now lets you send projects to iDVD without compressing them to MP4 first, improving the quality. You can also set chapter stops in iMovie, but you can’t send multiple videos to iDVD without an intermediate step. Apple has missed a lot of opportunities here, such as Blu-ray support and providing a simple way to consolidate multiple iMovies and iPhoto slideshows onto one DVD. You can do that, but it involves exporting, dragging, and dropping—at which point you might as well use something else. If you’re looking for a DVD-burning program to use with anything except iMovie, Roxio’s Toast 10 Titanium is far superior. But as a way to burn your iMovie projects to beautifully themed DVDs, it’s still a good choice. —Tim Gideon and Sascha Segan Building out Your site iWeb lets you drop widgets onto your page to add complex objects—such as rSS feeds—to your site quickly. hoMeMade hollYwood iMovie ’09 supports dual video tracks, to a limited extent. You can drop in a second track while still playing the first’s audio or create a greenscreen effect. april 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 23
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