Apple brought out there updated iLife Suite – the last one came part of OS X (leopard) 10.5 Series and this comprises of:

• iPhoto
• iMovie
• Garageband
• iWeb
• iDVD

iPhoto

They have introduced “faces” and “Places” – they already had events which ’08 brought in, allowing you to group photographs by event such as Birthday party, holiday and so forth. Faces recognises (or attempts to) peoplw in the photograph and once competed, this allows you to go through an entire selection of a person. Places are much the same and is handy if you take photographcs from various locations. A lot of new Camera’s have Geo Tagging and if it does – this process is automatic but if not – you can manually tell it were the photo was taken.

I spent ages going through and it got a hell of a lot wrong – mostly people from the same family all been seen as one person which makes some sense and I had no way of knowing what had been done for example. I guess doing one Event at a time might be the best idea and also to make sure you do each one as imported.

iWeb

I have never been a fan of iWeb, no import, no saving of files in a normal html format and so forth. The yhave added more widgets on the right hand side I see now and this may be great for people who have no idea about web sites but for anyone else – there is better stuff out there.

Garageband

I have always loved this program and it has just got better – now it can teach you how to play piano or guitar. You have to download the rest of the tutorials should you need them and this is a good idea as it saves on initial size of the application and only those who need it can get it. Not really had a good chance to go through this properly but once I do – I will write a proper review.

iMovie

They have started to add more professional type stuf into this product now and slowly moving back towards iMovie 06 HD which was better then all of the programs so far. If you are buying iLife purely for iMovie – maybe think about buying better programs made by apple.

Conclusion

While all the programs are great, unless there is a feature you must have – you can get along well enough with iLife 08 to be honest. It probably won’t take that long for the features to trickle into the other free PC Programs and it will be considered normal.

Ilife 09 on the apple store USA comes in at $79 but if you now convert across to UK prices – that £69. I used XE to see how much it really is – it comes out as £56 and let us not forget that shipping is added anyhow on top of those prices. The only thing I can think of is Taxes – maybe it is more to sell to UK?

The problem of swapping the $ sign for the £ sign happens way too much though – making the price of the item double the price, they wonder why people torrent? well this is maybe one of the reasons.