Macworld Coverage: iLife ‘09

After taking the stage for the keynote address, Phil Schiller quickly dove into the topic of new products. Unfortunately, the new product pool is disappointingly shallow.

Courtesy of Apple

iLife has been updated with all-new versions of all applications.

iPhoto ‘09

• Faces: New face recognition technology allows you to organize your photo library by faces. iPhoto can detect which images include a human face, and display those images for you to organize or annotate, an easy way to whip a large collection of photos of family and friends into shape.
• Places: Using the geotagging capabilities available in many cameras, Places organizes photos based on where they were shot, and can display a map that identifies images by location.
• Facebook and Flickr support: iPhoto now supports image syncing with Facebook. Update an image in iPhoto, and your Facebook account will be automatically updated with the new image. New integration with Flickr allows you to upload images from iPhoto, complete with geotagging codes, so that visitors to your Flickr page can see exactly where the image was taken.
• Slideshows: iPhoto 09 comes with new slideshow themes and the ability to save a slideshow to iTunes, where you can then sync the slideshow to your iPod or iPhone.

iMovie ‘09

• Advanced timeline views.
• Complex timeline editing.
• Video stabilization removes jitter from your movies.
• Animated maps.
• New themes.

GarageBand ‘09

• Learn to Play: GarageBand can help you learn how to play guitar or a keyboard using a new video instructor that overlays the GarageBand user interface. The instructions include detailed views of playing keyboards and guitars, and musical notation displays in sync with the videos. Also includes nine lessons each for guitar and keyboard.
• Learn to Play lessons will be available from some impressive musical artists, including John Fogerty, Patrick Stump, Sarah MacLachlan, and Norah Jones. There will be additional free Learn to Play lessons available from Apple, as well as for-fee lessons, for $4.99 per lesson package.

iWeb ‘09

• Dynamic widgets: Drag and drop interactive widgets to a web page for complex interaction. Use widgets to create RSS feeds, iSight photo and video integration, YouTube videos, HTML snippets, Google Maps, and more.
• Facebook notification: You can configure iWeb ‘09 to automatically notify your Facebook friends whenever you make a change to your web site.
• Manage multiple sites: The iWeb sites organizer allows you to organize, name, or delete individual web pages as well as entire web sites. You can also now publish one page at a time, via MobileMe or by FTP.