Sure, Steve said today’s event was all about the iMac, but what’s more Mac than software? Without great software, after all, the Mac is no more than a pretty face. And so, at long last, Apple has announced iLife ‘08. “We’ve increased our lead over the PC world every time we come out with a new version of iLife,” said Jobs, “and we’re not stopping.”
So what’s new and different? Well, Steve showed off a handful of new features for the apps, starting with a “dramatically enhanced” iPhoto.
One problem with pictures in this digital age is that there are just so many of them. In order to help reduce the clutter, iPhoto ‘08 will add Events. Events appear to be automatically created from pictures that you take in a day, with the ability to merge and split them into different events. So instead of a 5000 photo library, you’re now looking at 50 or 100 events instead.
In addition, you can now hide photos. Maybe there are photos you don’t want to delete, but you don’t necessarily want to have coming up all the time either. iPhoto ‘08 lets you hide them, and then later bring them back if so desired. It also adds a unified search, to make it easy to find photos via date, keyword, or rating.
There’s also improved editing features, like the ability to copy adjustments you’ve made in one photo and “paste” them onto other photos. And, like previous versions of iPhoto, there are improved books, calendars, and printing.
iPhoto also takes advantage of some new features of .Mac, including a very easy Web Gallery export that lets you turn your photos into a “stunning” Web 2.0 photo gallery that anyone—Mac or Windows, any browser—can see. There’s also integration with the iPhone, letting you send pictures from your iPhone to your .Mac web gallery, and browsing web galleries on the iPhone uses the built-in photo viewer. You can also give out the special email address of your gallery to your friends, so they can send photos to it as well. Finally, web galleries sync back with your Mac, so that picture will end up on your computer too.
[Image via Gizmodo]
