I’m up playing with iLife 06. Here’s my mini-review.
First, I like the fact that all the apps are following iTunes in their ‘edgeless’ appearance. Second, it’s interesting that a few of the apps are starting to look like other Apple Apps. Once example would be iWeb. It looks kinda like Pages. At first glance you could almost mistake iWeb for Pages. Weird. Third, the media viewer seems more present in this release and it’s an interesting concept to access you movies, photos, and music that you have. This cross pollination will take some time to get use to. Not that I’m complaining, I like the idea of easily sharing assets between programs.
iPhoto
I totally dig iPhoto, the Photocasts (rss feeds) look decent in NetNewsWire, and I like how they kept the “published” icon consistent across ical and iphoto. It IS much snappier and I like the full-screen editing. My only complaint is when entering and leaving full-screen editing I was expecting a nice fade in and out, perhaps with a slide of the menus. What I received was a quick snap in and out. Meh.
iMovie/iDVD
I looked at this briefly. I like the fact that there is a category of Video FX that allows you to use compositions from Quartz Composer. This opens up the possibility of someone creating some spectacular effect ‘plugins’ I also like the new iDVD themes; pretty always wins a point in my book.
Garageband
I haven’t messed with any of the podcasting stuff in Garageband. But I will soon.
iWeb
I created a quick page (http://web.mac.com/ckoerner/iWeb/) in iWeb. It renders nicely in Safari, Firefox, and yes even IE for the Mac. I can’t see anyone who already has a blog (such as WordPress) wanting to use the blogging feature, it seems kinda clunky compared to the content management systems I’ve used in the past.
iTunes
It’s been around for awhile, and I’m not sure if it’s even technically part of iLife anymore. But i like it!