Phil Schiller announced today at the Macworld Expo that Apple will be shipping iLife ’09. A disproportionately large section of Schiller’s keynote was spent discussing and demoing the new features in iLife ’09. He broke it down into three of the apps: iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband.
In iPhoto, Phil showed us two new ways of organizing our photos: “Faces” and “Places.” Faces is iPhoto’s face recognition implementation. Use a mix of automation, and manual manipulation to organize all of your friends and family by their faces on a virtual cork-board. Places is essentially a geotagging implementation. It takes the metadata from your GPS-enabled cameras (Like the iPhone), and it places it on a map that is powered by Google. Also included is built-in Flickr and Facebook support, and slideshow themes.
In iMovie, we’re shown the that there is now much more granular editing capabilities. It is now possible to overlay video from one clip with the audio of a second clip without a kludge. We’re also shown brand new effects for your video (Similar to Photobooth), and apparently it renders on the fly. No need to sit and watch a status bar.
In Garageband, we are treated to a new feature called “Learn to Play.” These are videos that will teach basic lessons about how to play an instrument. Besides the basics that it comes with, we will be able to buy additional videos online for $4.99 a pop. These videos are done by famous musicians such as Sting and Norah Jones.
The additions to iLife are fairly substantial. With today’s announcement of a $169 bundle with Leopard and iWork ’09, this is an upgrade you won’t want to miss.
