OK, I installed iLife '08 and have played with it VERY briefly. Here are some initial impressions:
iPhoto
iPhoto will upgrade your library when you first open it. I only have a few photos on this MacBook Pro. It went quickly, but I have no real idea how long a large library will take until I set it up on my main machine.
The upgrade essentially takes what used to be called "Rolls" (which were individual import sessions) and turns them in to "Events". As I say, this is a tiny library, so I have no idea if it employs more intelligence and breaks up larger Rolls into multiple Events. The only Roll I had in my library was the pics I took on the EMA trip, which encompassed a week. It kept all of these in one Event, but it was easy to break it up into multiple events (EMA, Grand Canyon, etc.) just by selecting the boundary picture and clicking the "split" button. This new feature would have saved me MUCH work if I had had it a month or so ago...
The Rolls view shows thumbnails for each Event. If you move the mouse cursor over a thumbnail is quickly skims through the pics in that Event. This is almost impossible to describe, but it is WAY cool in practice.
I also looked quickly at editing. Now, iPhoto is never going to be a substitute for a full-blown editor, but they have added to its bag of tricks. The new Shadow/Highlight adjustment sliders work very well and I expect they will get a lot of use.
Garage Band
I checked out the new Magic Garage Band. It works as advertised, but after the initial coolness you realize that, in its current form, it's basically a gimmick. The problem is you have a small number of genres and only ONE tune per genre!! The only variations are the instruments you pick for each arrangement. I guarantee we are all going to get tired of hearing these tunes very quickly. If you need music generation like this you'll be much better off with that old standby Band-In-A-Box, or Sony Creative Software's (Windows-only) Cinescore.
Otherwise, GB looks much the same. There are other improvements I've read about, but I haven't had time to dive into them yet
iMovie
Jobs wasn't kidding. iMovie looks like a complete rewrite. I don't have any movie clips on this machine, so I briefly played around with photos. Seems to work fairly well. I'd love to hear Ron's take on this update given his recent experience with iMovie '06.
iDVD
Didn't do much here other than check out some of the new themes. There are some cool ones in there.
iWeb
Played around with this for a few minutes. It looks like they've addressed one complaint and added comment capability to blogs. The on-the-fly theme replacement works well. Didn't play yet with the web clip feature.
Summary
It's really too early to give an overall assessment of the new iWork, as I've barely scratched the surface of these apps. Most of my existing projects (iMovie, iWeb, iDVD) are on my other machine, and I look forward to reading them into the new apps and really checking out the new features. I can say the iPhoto update looks like a winner.
More over the next few days...
iPhoto
iPhoto will upgrade your library when you first open it. I only have a few photos on this MacBook Pro. It went quickly, but I have no real idea how long a large library will take until I set it up on my main machine.
The upgrade essentially takes what used to be called "Rolls" (which were individual import sessions) and turns them in to "Events". As I say, this is a tiny library, so I have no idea if it employs more intelligence and breaks up larger Rolls into multiple Events. The only Roll I had in my library was the pics I took on the EMA trip, which encompassed a week. It kept all of these in one Event, but it was easy to break it up into multiple events (EMA, Grand Canyon, etc.) just by selecting the boundary picture and clicking the "split" button. This new feature would have saved me MUCH work if I had had it a month or so ago...
The Rolls view shows thumbnails for each Event. If you move the mouse cursor over a thumbnail is quickly skims through the pics in that Event. This is almost impossible to describe, but it is WAY cool in practice.
I also looked quickly at editing. Now, iPhoto is never going to be a substitute for a full-blown editor, but they have added to its bag of tricks. The new Shadow/Highlight adjustment sliders work very well and I expect they will get a lot of use.
Garage Band
I checked out the new Magic Garage Band. It works as advertised, but after the initial coolness you realize that, in its current form, it's basically a gimmick. The problem is you have a small number of genres and only ONE tune per genre!! The only variations are the instruments you pick for each arrangement. I guarantee we are all going to get tired of hearing these tunes very quickly. If you need music generation like this you'll be much better off with that old standby Band-In-A-Box, or Sony Creative Software's (Windows-only) Cinescore.
Otherwise, GB looks much the same. There are other improvements I've read about, but I haven't had time to dive into them yet
iMovie
Jobs wasn't kidding. iMovie looks like a complete rewrite. I don't have any movie clips on this machine, so I briefly played around with photos. Seems to work fairly well. I'd love to hear Ron's take on this update given his recent experience with iMovie '06.
iDVD
Didn't do much here other than check out some of the new themes. There are some cool ones in there.
iWeb
Played around with this for a few minutes. It looks like they've addressed one complaint and added comment capability to blogs. The on-the-fly theme replacement works well. Didn't play yet with the web clip feature.
Summary
It's really too early to give an overall assessment of the new iWork, as I've barely scratched the surface of these apps. Most of my existing projects (iMovie, iWeb, iDVD) are on my other machine, and I look forward to reading them into the new apps and really checking out the new features. I can say the iPhoto update looks like a winner.
More over the next few days...