iWork and iLife ’09 to share the spotlight Tuesday?
Well, despite Apple’s invite making it very clear that the “focus would be on notebooks” at Tuesday’s special event, word is now trickling out that we may be seeing some token updates to both the iLife and iWork suites. Mac Soda, the same folks who brought us the nVidia graphics card in the new MacBooks rumors claims to have knowledge of a joint notebooks/iApps announcement set for Tuesday.
I’m not a big fan of joint special announcements outside of Macworld where Steve has time to really go over the changes to all the new goodies. To my mind a joint announcement means either the new notebooks will be somewhat underwhelming, or the iApps will be of the incremental and “big featureless” variety. Those of you pumped up about the new portables will be happy to know that based on the past two iWork/iLife updates, I am leaning towards their updates sucking, and the laptops being reasonably impressive. First, the invite specifically mentions the notebooks, which means Apple at least thinks they have something worth talking about. But more importantly, aside from ruining iMovie, the only changes to the iLife suite Apple has made since 2005 is more and more .Mac integration to the point where I expect iLife ’09 to pretty much require you pay $99 for MobileMe in order to even boot iPhoto or listen to iTunes.
We happen to be close interweb friends with the Mac Soda crew, so we’re actually pulling for them on this one (and the nVidia thing). It would be nice to see another rumor source on the scene with some street cred. Of course, if they totally blow this, then they are dead to us. We’re extremely disloyal like that.
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That would be GREAT news.
iLife and iWork are amazing products. I would love to see an upgrade. I’m not really sure what they need upgraded on though. Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve theses software suites?
(Unlike the Doc I am a big fan of MobileMe (MM) and of course any updates to iLife or iWork would obviously include more MM integration. For twenty-eight cents a day you get a lot, especially if you use iWeb to easily design websites. I hope their is an upgrade to iWeb.)
While I also use and highly recommend iWork/Life and mobileme. It makes little since to come out now with the update. More lilkey when Snow Leopard ships next summer.
Snow Leopard isn’t adding a lot of new features but instead is refining things more. An update now isn’t going to be too much of an issue with Snow Leopard coming out later.
Unlike Dr Mac, I think there were a lot of updates in the previous version obviously iMovie ’08 but also iWeb had massive changes as did iWork with Numbers.
I love iMovie ’08 and don’t think they ruined it. I think it is way more powerful than ’06 but it’s a matter of getting used to the interface. I guess there’s a lot of old dogs out there not wanting to learn new tricks. Personally I use it as a rough and dirty editor to get it ready to use in Final Cut Express which I use for the more powerful edit.
I hope iWeb is going to get the ability to edit code and templates but that’s pure speculation of wanted features. Code editing would be a boon as it’s very very messy at the moment to use an external editor because editing the code breaks things. Making templates can be a pain in the jacksie.
Numbers will have a lot more functions added as there’s a lot of requirements for workarounds at the moment.
I’m not sure what you can do for the rest of the apps though but the newer products like iMovie, iWeb, and Numbers can do with a bit more work to make them great.
Well at the last iPod event they did mention the 2.1 update for the iPhone so I don’t think it’s too crazy to think they might make some small side announcement of something that runs on the thing they are discussing.
Only thing with the iPod event is people were pissed they didn’t say more about the iPhone 2.1 updated…go figure?
I realy want to see a better intregation of iWeb in MobileMe. At the moment iWeb and Groups are moved aside in the new MobileMe. So I realy hope their will be e better integration and a more smooth way to export iLife content to MobileMe!
I’m an Ilife ’06 holdout, and the main (if not only) tool I use is iphoto, and my library now contains 40,000 + photos so I’m looking for speed, speed, and more speed.
I would love it if iphoto were more like Picasa, and would embrace keeping photos elsewhere (and updating the thumbnails in the background). I would really love it if Iphoto would allow perform background tasks like Itunes does (so I can get on with something else). I would love it if one could create albums in folders (rather than having to drag them in later), let you edit comments in textedit (or even attach files to albums), and SORT albums and folders.
It would be great if you have a choice of “external editors” (rather than going to preferences each time), and when dragging a photo from Iphoto to another app have the photo resized on the way in.
Finally, before I invest any more time than necessary in commenting my photos and albums, what about some robust and open storage of metadata. I simply don’t trust my life work to a fickle lump of data unreadable and unalterable by anything else (the AlbumData.xml does not contain all the metadata).