“Apple iLife ’08 iLife is a triumph [and it’s] the easiest way to make and share beautiful multimedia. If you have a small child, faraway family members, and a Mac, it’s a must-buy. And if you’ve never dared make a movie before, the new iMovie is for you,” Sascha Segan reports for PC Magazine.
“iLife is five programs for $79, a great value—each of the individual programs is worth the price for the package. It combines iPhoto, the best program out there for organizing and ordering prints of your photos; iMovie, a basic but almost unbelievably easy video editor; iWeb, a template-based Web design program; iDVD, which turns iPhotos and iMovies into slick, attractive DVDs; and GarageBand, which lets you record podcasts and assemble basic soundtracks from musical loops,” Segan reports.
Segan’s review gives the following individual scores:
• iPhoto – 5 out of 5: iPhoto sets and maintains the standard for managing your personal photo library and churning out those holiday calendars the grandparents rely on.
• iDVD – 4 out of 5: iDVD is an effortlessly easy, yet surprisingly, flexible way to create good-looking, standard-def video and photo DVDs.
• iMovie – 4 out of 5: This isn’t an upgrade to iMovie HD—iMovie ’08 is an entirely new program that lets you create simple movies extremely quickly.
• iWeb – 3.5 out of 5: As long as you also have a .Mac account, iWeb takes all of the fear and confusion out of creating a basic personal Web site.
• GarageBand – 3.5 out of 5: This software looks great, is easy to use, and has some novel new features, like Visual EQ and Magic GarageBand. Not for pros, this is software you will eventually graduate from—but it makes learning fun.
And a composite score of 4 out of 5 for the iLife ’08 suite.
Full in-depth review here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Corinne” for the heads up.]
The bottom line is that PC Magazine is giving the thumbs up to a significant mac product. Enjoy!
A review like this is precisely why I quit reading PC Magazine several years ago. Warmed over press releases! Imovie 06 was close to the power of Adobe Premier Elements or Pinnacle Studio. A few more features and the Mac market would have had a strong competitor to the PC in the midrange video editing market. As it stand now I will be left to using bootcamp to continue to produce videos.
PCWorld TRAITORS!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Clowns to the left of me, traitors to the right ….
Remember that movie, “Willard”, he trains an army of rats that eventually turn on him?
They are led by Ben and Socrates: fat, stinky, maladjusted, nasty, illtempered, fickle rats who just can’t be pleased. Well, lately I have been feeling a little Willardy, you see some of the head fat, stinky, maladjusted, nasty, illtempered, fickle rats who just can’t be pleased have been turning on MS just because they have had a few minor problems with Vista. The rats:
BEN – Jim Louderhack (uncerimoniously dismissed editor of PCWorld) took his parting shot;
“So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn’t work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly.”
SOCRATES – James Shallows (Poorly attried National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly) says he is going back to XP;
“…I said that users should wait to buy new computers until the new version of Windows, Vista, was available — and that “of course” they should buy Vista-equipped machines once they could. That was wrong. I apologize.”
My response, in the words of imortal Willard himself;
“You’re trying to take my house. You made a fool of me in front of everybody. You made me hate myself. I thought about it a lot, hating myself. Well right now, at this moment, I LIKE myself.”
To the Microsoft faithful I say, to the forums, man you blogs, “Tear ’em up! muahahahahaha”
“Closed ecosystem doesn’t accept much content from other software.”
What? Let’s not let reality get in the way of a good sound bite.
iLife accepts a WIDE range of standard image, video, and audio files. VERY wide. Better, I would say, than many non-QuickTime-enabled apps.
Maybe they just mean that you can’t import WMV clips? I bet you can, for free, with Flip4Mac.
iWeb has been a total and complete let down. It’s totally worthless without .mac account and frankly, I don’t need another web page to design.
I’D LIKE TO DESIGN THE ONES I HAVE ALREADY!
They need to make a Web program for iWork. I’m kind of shocked though, I haven’t been this completely disappointed in a Mac software in a long long time.
iWeb is very Microsoftish.
@toby
I see your point. But I have a .Mac account and therefore iWeb is my favourite iLife app.
It is more flexible than most people realise and you can make tasteful, professional looking web pages very easily.
Another thing the reviewer didn’t really focus on is the integration of iPhoto with .Mac. If you want your family all around the world to see your photos, this is a good solution (again, only if you can afford a .Mac account).
Don’t get me wrong, I have always believed .Mac should be free. Then it would be a much better differentiator for Apple. And I can’t believe they currently make much money out of it anyway.
Synthmeister,
none of those features you listed stops or slows you down if you are just in it for making music.
You play, record, save it, thats what most people are happy with and all they need.
If you are just for recording (say some others band) then its different case. But for what the name Garageband implies, it does everything perfectly.
Some people seem to treat their sequencer software as an instrument which it is not. I’ve been using Logic since version 4, Cubase from its vst24 days, and now i do everything, absolutely EVERYTHING, using very little of external plugins, in Ableton, because it is simple and stable. Garageband is also simple and its rather stable too. Thats what recording your music should be also. In my opinion, there is not even a real need for mixer automation (which is rather basic feature of all recording softwares), as there are much more better ways to do it than just wiggle your mouse.
about time someone agreed with me