“While Apple’s Macintosh computers are known for handsome hardware design, what really makes the Mac distinctive is its built-in software. That software includes a suite of multimedia programs, called iLife, which is preinstalled, free, on every new Mac,” Walt Mossberg reports for The Wall Street Journal. “The iLife software has integrated photo, video, music and Web-design applications meant for average, nontechnical consumers. It is better, in my view, than any comparable offering on the Windows platform, even those that cost extra.”
“This week, Apple released the latest version of the suite, called iLife ’09, and I have been testing it for a while,” Mossberg reports. “For me… the most important improvements in iLife ’09 are in iPhoto, Apple’s program for organizing, editing and sharing digital pictures. The top two are face recognition and geo-tagging, the ability to tag a photo with its location.”
Mossberg reivews Apple iLife ’09:
Direct link to video here.
Mossberg reports, “In my tests, on two different Macs with thousands of photos, face recognition worked most of the time. But I was too often disappointed. In a surprisingly large minority of cases, iPhoto failed to detect the presence of a face, even when it was large and clear, or to correctly identify faces it did detect, even after I had named or confirmed the same face in dozens or scores of other pictures.”
“The Places feature worked much better, automatically recognizing the location of pictures taken from devices with built-in GPS tagging, like Apple’s own iPhone, and optionally showing a map when you click on a photo,” Mossberg reports. “It was also easy to manually enter a location for an entire ‘event,’ or group, of photos taken at one time.”
Mossberg writes, “I still like and recommend iPhoto and iLife. But, in my opinion, the new face-recognition system isn’t up to Apple’s self-proclaimed high standards, and isn’t reliable enough to justify an upgrade all by itself.”
More in the full review, including Walt’s takes on GarageBand and iMovie, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Carl H.” for the heads up.]
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