DigitalSandbox

So the Steve-Note Phil-Note has just finished and it’s time to review the announcements. As expected by most everyone, there wasn’t much of earth-shattering significance in this one. But you didn’t really expect Steve to let Phil have a new iPhone or Mac Net-Book did you? Basically, there was iLife 09, iWork 09, and the 17” MacBook Pro. And then a nice iTunes announcement (but nothing so large as to merit a whole piece of the Keynote).

So let’s get in there and see what the hub-bub is all about, shall we?

iLife 09

Frankly, this was the the highlight of the keynote for me. For many people, that will be a sure sign of a dull and boring keynote, but let’s face it, most people use these apps a lot. I know that iPhoto alone comprises a lot of what I use my computer for. I guess I liked this portion so much because they finally announced two features I have been dying for in iPhoto. Geotagging and face recognition.

I have been trying for a very long time to get my photos properly tagged (or keyworded, if you prefer Apple’s lingo) and it is a major pain. The new tagging mechanism in iPhoto 08 helped a lot, but there was always more that I wanted to do. I want every photo to have at least two types of tags, if nothing else. I want to know who is in the photo, and where it was taken. I have been doing this manually, but it is a major time-hog and I am so far behind it would take a week or two straight of tagging to get it done. On top of that I kept changing up how I was tagging locations. As I would move so would the terms used for home. It got complicated and as I learned more about geotagging I longed for this feature to be added.

Now iPhoto 09 has both built geotagging and face recognition built in. That will help immensely in getting me caught up and up-to-date. The face recognition will actually scan your pictures and make guesses as to who it is (it asks you to confirm, of course) and will allow you to easily browse your library by person. I literally cannot wait to try this out. Geotagging will use Google Maps to find locations allow you to assign locations to photos not already tagged and browse those that are. I have been trying some alternate methods of geotagging, but none of them have ever made it into my workflow as they required too many hoops. This update alone will be worth the cost of admission for me. Oh yeah, and they finally added the ability to upload to Flickr. ‘Bout. Freakin’. Time.

iMovie has improved editing features that should help silence the I-miss-iMovie-06 crowd. And they have added image stabilization. That will be a very nice feature for many home movie takers. I am seriously thinking of getting a large hard drive and copying all of my DV tapes over to iMovie and keeping every thing tagged and ready for future projects. I’ll have to look into that.

The only other app that got an update (at least that was mentioned in the keynote) was Garageband. The big update here is the feature of teaching you to play instruments. There are several types of lessons on the basics and then something really cool you can learn to play a popular song while being instructed by the artist themselves. That is actually really cool and as I have been wanting to learn to play guitar for a long time now, this could finally be the year I do it. Additional lessons are $4.99, but I am pretty sure I would pay at least that much or more to have someone teach me so it doesn’t sound that bad.

iWork 09

Not sure what to say about this one. Some nice new features I guess, but I didn’t really hear anything that got me excited. It’s a nice productivity suite and I am sure the new version is more awesome. The only thing I really heard that was cool, but not necessarily cool to me, is the iWork.com. Let’s just say it’s Google Docs from Apple and leave it at that. It may well prove to be a really useful thing, but I don’t need to share a lot of documents that require editing, so it’s a bit of a non-starter for me. Moving on.

17” MacBook Pro

This one, too, was just about everything we expected. Unibody construction, Mini DisplayPort, dual NVidia graphics cards, blah, blah blah. The really exciting change here is the new battery. Yes, it’s non-removable…get over it. The cool thing is that Apple claims it gives you up to 8 hours of battery life. 8 hours! That is huge. I am not a power user in the laptop department (just my cheapo Dell from work), but I bet there are a lot of people that would be willing to swap replaceable batteries for 8 hour of battery life.

One More Thing

I’m just going to come out and say it — DRM-free iTunes. Finally! Almost every song on iTunes is now DRM-free and all songs will be DRM-free by the end of the quarter. This is fantastic news as it now puts Apple back on par with offerings by other competitors (read: Amazon. Since they are the only real competitor). I guess that in order to get it they had to give up their fixed pricing model as there will now be three tiers of pricing (69¢, 99¢, and $1.29), but I think it will be worth it. I have 67 songs waiting to be updated right now. I will be doing that very soon.

And that will do it for this MacWorld. I guess you could look at it as going out with a whimper, but frankly, I didn’t expect much excitement from this one. No Mac Minis was about the only real disappointment in my mind. All the other rumors (iPhone Nano, et al) never really made a lot of sense to me. Besides, I think we will still see some of these products soon, just not in a MacWorld forum. I would rather they released the stuff when it’s ready, rather than announce it at MacWorld and say it’s available in March, anyway.