Cory Bohon

iLife ’06

The iLife suite of “anti-productivity” tools has gotten better, and more integrated in this great release. iWeb, a website creation tool, is the new member of the iLife family. Below are some of the new features, broken-down by product.

iTunes- this is a free program, bundled with iLife, the only updated (6.0.2) is a new mini store feature, which offers music as you listen to your library.

iMovie- New to iMovie is the ability to create a title movie, open multiple projects, and a sound editor, and the ability to create more text effects.

iDVD- You can now create a “Magic iDVD” in a snap, new themes, and a new interface makes this program even better.

Garageband- new podcast studio, with added loops, and jingles, makes this program alone worth the cost of the entire suite.

iPhoto- new photocast lets you share your photos with people via a photo RSS feed. Additional books, cards, calendars, and the new editing in full-screen, makes this a good upgrade.

iWeb- this is the new addition to the iLife family, this is a really great, and handy tool for creating websites on the go. iWeb features many Apple designed templates (or you can start from scratch and make your own). Then you just enter in the information, add links, music, photos, and podcasts, click upload, and all the RSS, and encoding is done for you! Your site can be uploaded to .Mac, or you can save the files as .HTML, and upload them to your own server.

This was a really big (and much needed) upgrade to iLife. All of the upgrades really make this an amazing version of iLife.

iWork ’06

Wow, you just thought iWork ’05 was really great, wait until you have a chance to see some of the new features in iWork ’06! Some of the new features include: the ability to create even more stunning presentations, documents, tables (that will now auto-calculate!), and really stunning 3D graphs, which have wood-grain textures. iWork ’06 includes, Pages 2, and Keynote 3, and great fun creating documents, and presentations! Some of the new features in Pages is that it includes so many more templates, and the ability to create your own custom shapes, and then drop an image onto it. Then, check out the new reflections tool, which puts a glass-looking reflection below your pictures; and look at the new graphs! Even greater is the fact that if you drop a picture into your document or presentation, you have the ability, with one click, to make adjustments to the image, without even leaving Pages, or Keynote! This is just one more amazing product, from the greatest company, Apple.

iMac (Core Duo)

I took a look at the first of the new Intel Macs. The first thing that you notice about the iMac Core Duo, is it looks just like the iMac G5 (iSight). It does not have any new cosmetic features. The second thing that you notice, is that the thing is blazingly fast! It runs iLife ’06, iWork ’06, and the built-in apps (ex. Safari) really fast. It even runs Microsoft Office version 2004 really fast, even though this Power PC app. is running over the OS X integrated Rosetta, which allows you to run “most” of the PPC (Power PC) software on the new Macs. Overall, this is an amazing computer (but hey, It’s from Apple!).

Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) is now available for the Mac, it is in PPC form though!