“Are you envious of Mac users who get to play with cool tools? Especially the suite of tools called iLife ’05? iLife is a collection of tools that make managing your digital assets, images, and audio and video not only fun but cool,” Matthew David writes for Informit.com.
The iLife suite includes all these products:
• iTunes: Manages your music collection; you can also buy new music at the iTunes Store
• iPhoto: Allows you to easily manage all your digital photographs and images
• iMovie: Enables you to create nonlinear digital movies quickly and easily
• iDVD: Allows you to create professional-level quality DVDs with assets from iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie
• Garage Band: Lets you record, mix, and manage up to four tracks of music
David writes, “The whole suite is available only for the Mac at the incredibly reasonable price of $79 (or free if you buy a Mac Mini). The suite of tools works incredibly well together. But you run Windows XP! Apple does not make a Windows version of iLife. What can you do? Fortunately, not only can you replicate what the Apple folks have but you might be able to one-up them on the functionality of some products, and others are just downright cheaper.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: David attempts to find iLife equivalents for Windows (for iTunes, he recommends Apple’s iTunes for Windows, of course; for iPhoto, he picks PhotoShop Album or Picasa; for iMovie HD, he picks Microsoft’s Movie Maker while mentioning that, “You can’t create high definition video, as iMovie ’05 can, and you are restricted to only one video and one audio layer” and; for iDVD, he picks Adobe’s $99 Premier Elements which is $20 more than Apple entire iLife suite and; for GarageBand, he writes, “Garage Band is the one tool that is hard to replicate directly on the Windows platform because the product is so unique” and ends up mentioning Audacity.
David’s “solutions” are not tightly integrated like Apple’s iLife applications, where you can seamlessly share media between all of the iLife applications. In fact, they’re not integrated at all. Somehow, David ends up concluding, “There is no need to be bummed or envious of the Mac crowd. With a little creativity, and even a frugal budget, you can follow my lead and easily emulate iLife ’05 on the Windows platform.”
David’s own piece clearly shows that one cannot “emulate iLife ’05 on Windows.” You just can’t. So, David’s article end up being an exercise in contradiction and futility. Following his suggestions will produce poor results compared to iLife; pretty much the same concept as using Windows to emulate the Mac OS. There’s the real thing and then there’s a hodgepodge trying and failing to be something from Apple. It’s fruitless (get it?).
Stop the madness! Windows users who want to do everything that iLife ’05 can do would be much better off adding a Mac mini (starts at $499) to their setup – Apple’s iLife is included, so by saving $79 users are already looking at a Mac OS X Tiger computer that starts at $420 and also comes with Spotlight, Safari, Mail, Dashboard, and on and on and on.
More info:
Apple’s Mac mini
Apple iLife ’05
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Failure to duplicate Apple again! What is wrong with these people!
Some people will drive 100 miles to save a buck while spending five times what they think they’ve “saved” in the process.
MDN MW: “tired” – as in, aren’t you tired of trying and failing to fake the Mac experiecne? Why don’t you just finally go get a real Mac?!
How is $99 for one product he recommends “downright cheaper” than a suite of apps from Apple for $79? This idiot cannot even do grade school level comparisons with dollar values.
I will write him and challenge him to make a good project on each of those programs. I will make a good project on each of the iLife Applications, then we will let the net decide.
We’ll see if he responds
Sorry, that was rude, I didn’t mean to call the writer an idiot.
Here is another article by him.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=400034&seqNum=1
not just a Mini. And pre-installed to boot.
So how is staying with Windows going to be cheaper?!?
“Garage Band: Lets you record, mix, and manage up to four tracks of music”
Four tracks? Where’d he get that from?
Comparing Audacity to GarageBand is really funny. Don’t get me wrong, Audacity is a great program, especially for free, but they just barely live in the same space. It’s like saying that iPhoto is better than Photoshop. Sure, they both have the word “Photo” in their name, but they really just barely overlap in function.
Give it up David. It ain’t happening.
OMG!!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”big surprise” style=”border:0;” /> Audacity is not even in the same category as GarageBand! That’s lame. Dumb article. What a waste of my time reading it.
David has an agenda looking for a rationale.
Microsofts movie maker is a piece of crap compared to iMovie. Use Adobe premiere or others but not movie maker.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grrr” style=”border:0;” />
By the time you add up all the software you bought for the Windows machine you could probably just buy a Mac Mini with a super drive and use the real iLife 05 suite of software that comes with it standard.
The author is writing for a Windows audience. As such, he didn’t do a terrible job. He frankly credits Apple properly for a doig a fine job with the iLife suite.
So what’s the big fuss?…
Yawn…..
the emperor wears no clothes…
Re: JadisOne
No need to apologize, idiot was the correct term. Moron would also be appropriate, as would simpleton or goofball.
Re: JadisOne
Pin head is also a good descriptive term.
Was that a total of $140, using one of the Apple apps anyway, and missing Garageband ?
Hmmm. I think not.
Someone has commented there about something called photo story 3, and saying that iLife doesn’t do that. I think it gets pretty close, but doesn’t add comments/titles. It’s like it does everything slideshows do, plus titles, but very likely not integrated with anything.
So to do the same thing just needs iLife. The guy suggests it needs iPhoto and iMovie, but this is twisting things to suggest it’s clumsy. It does need both apps, but because the suite is integrated, just iMovie need be used. Doing it that way, to create a movie of pictures, with custom ken burns, transitions, music and titles uses just one interface.
The guy admits that to create a title slide would need an external app too.
Some people just miss the point.
I think for every dumb article someone writes, a placekicker should relocate their kachangas. With cleats on. Paul Thurrott’s wee wrinklies would be pudding by now.
Good points by MDN et al.
One critical thing was not mentioned: Windblows! Even if you could duplicate the Macintosh iLife products features and function, you are still stuck running (or trying to run) Windblows with it’s cludgy OS and malware infestation.
Did someone say ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ (TCO)?
Ah, Rock on Steve!
hahahhahahha… He recommended iTunes… what!?! isn’t there anything in the vast library of WinCrap that can compete with Apple’s small market-share cool apps?
Windows is finished! FINISHED111! fINISHED!!!!1ONEELVENONEHUNDREDELEVEN.
MDN-MW: Music–As in Apple and software make beautyful music together.
Well done, Mr. David. Bloody well done.
“I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!”
Won’t Get Fooled Again
-The Who
Yeah right, to use Idvd you need an imac mini with a dvd writer. That would be $699 instead of the 420 mentioned. Of course that excludes mouse/keys/monitor as ussual.
I have had a mini, its slow the text quality on screen is horrible. Dashboard is not innovative, its a direct copy of the, now free, konfabulator.
Allow me to rant, as i speak for experience with both computers.
-Picassa is way more responsive than Iphoto
-Itunes is horrible compared to f.e. Winamp
-Magix makes better music software than garageband is
-Having Safari is an negative point not a positive one
Never mind the doctors bill you will get from using the apple mouse, and the weird keyboard shortcuts you seem to have to use for just about anything.
And don’t forget glasses because you will have to squint your eyes due to the horrible text quality that all apple’s have (not just the mini).
iLife comes free with any Mac.
The problem is, people will believe Matthew David’s article.
“I heard you can do all that iLife stuff on a PC” is what they will say.
Any attempt to correct them will be met with derision.
From his InformIT bio, “Matthew David has been developing Flash-based applications for more than six years.”
Developing…Flash…six…years….
Now we know what’s wrong with him!
Mike A.:
It is sad that your eyes are used to the horrible fonts on Windows. Windows people think the magnetic-ink bank font is the ultimate of readability. When the awful jaggies and black corners are not there, you think it’s blurry.
It doesn’t help that Microsoft chooses the worst fonts of their tiny collection — they could do a better job with what they have, they just don’t care.
And now they’ve literally blinded their users to the possibility of good typography on a computer.
I speak as someone with decades of typography experience. Going back to the Linotype age of molten lead.
The Mac’s font selection and presentation are (and always have been) a decade beyond those available for Windows. Quartz is stunning, truly stunning: when OS X came out, I saw a beautiful Quartz descender put a gaggle of type jockeys into a slack-jawed trance.
It’s sad that you’re used to jaggies. I meet people like you all the time. I think they learned to read on a Windows box, and it damaged their young retinas and brains.
I don’t know if the damage is permanent.