No, I’m not talking about the next season of new cars. For one thing, I wouldn’t call 95% of the cars out there “worth it”, mostly because their gas mileage would make any non-American laugh with their fingers pointing, and for another thing, I really don’t care about cars anyway. Nevertheless, yesterday, Apple released iLife and iWork ‘08 (along with some other new stuff, which aren’t the focus of this article), which Steve Jobs claims to be their biggest updates ever to both releases. But after spending a couple of hours today following the announcements through Engadget’s live coverage, rubbing my eyes all over the Apple.com website, watching demo videos and tutorials, and all that stuff, I’m ready to judge for myself if iLife and iWork ‘08 are really that substantial, and if they’re each worth their respective $80 upgrade price.

iLife ‘08 was touted by Steve Jobs as the most substantial iLife update they’ve ever done, and there’s a good reason to claim that, after all, they’ve had a year and a half for this latest release. However, one of the things that I noticed when Steve Jobs was demoing iLife ‘08 was that he spent a good deal of time talking about iPhoto and iMovie, and then breezed through iWeb, iDVD, and GarageBand in only about 10 minutes or so. Indeed, when you look at the iLife ‘08 Guided Tour, about 75% of the video covers iPhoto and iMovie, the rest briefly touching on iWeb and GarageBand, and never mentioning iDVD. So really, whether or not iLife ‘08 is a substantial upgrade depends on which iLife apps you spend the most time in, because no one uses all five iLife apps all the time at equal levels.

iPhoto ‘08 is touted by Apple as the most significant update to iPhoto since they launched it over 5 years ago. Apple seems to be using that line a lot, considering they haven’t just used it for iLife as a whole, and iWork, and iMovie (see below), but they also used that line for the last two revisions of iPhoto: 5 and 6. Personally, I don’t think that this upgrade is as substantial as 5 and 6 were over their previous versions, mostly because the only major new thing that iPhoto brings to the market is this new concept called Events.

Now let’s get one thing straight: I do think Events is a pretty good analysis of how iPhoto users organize their albums. I have 3300 photos in my library (1566 of them from 2007), and when I look at my albums, I see an album of the 97 photos I took at WordCamp 2007 or the 120 photos I took when I went to New York in 2004 or the 593 photos I took at May’s State PTA Convention (yes, I was quite a shutterbug over in Sacramento this year). But what I have to wonder is what is the main advantage of Apple’s Events setup over what we currently have? Steve touted Events as the solution to no longer having to look through an entire photo library, but we were already doing the same thing by organizing them into albums ourselves, right? Now, I’m definitely going to have to wait to try out iPhoto ‘08 at an Apple Store to figure out just how this works, but apparently iPhoto has some way of automatically sorting photos into events as you import them. I honestly don’t know how it would figure this out, unless iPhoto automatically creates an event per day, which would explain why the guided tour shows you how to split an event into two, or merge two events into one, in order to fix events over two different days or two events in one day. And what about the photos that I have that have nothing to do with an event? Like those photos I took a few months back of the hats that my mom knitted to sell on eBay. Unless iPhoto wants to pretend that I participated in some sort of “hat-making event”, which I didn’t, then those photos don’t really fit in there. Personally, I would think that albums could still get the job done for most people, the only real advantage I see to having these events is being able to have a poster picture for an event (a borrowed Aperture feature), and the new “skimming” feature. Incidentally, that skimming feature looks interesting, though I would think it would be kind of clunky in an event with a lot of pictures, like that California State PTA Convention event with 593 pictures in there.

Now, iMovie ‘08 looks pretty darn good, even if the new icon for it is kinda cheesy. If I was an avid iMovie user (and I’m not), I would definitely be tempted to upgrade to iLife ‘08 for that baby. iMovie ‘08 pretty much is something that a lot of people, including myself, have been thinking for a long time: if iTunes is such a great application for organizing and storing your music and media files, and iPhoto is such a great application for organizing and storing your pictures, then why can’t iMovie be an application to organize and store your movies? Well, in this case your camera footage. However, the way Apple sees iMovie ‘08 is as an application that now allows you to quickly get to the footage that you’ve recorded, snip out the parts that you want quickly, and be able to quickly make a good-looking movie out of it. iMovie makes heavy use of the skimming function that iPhoto introduces as the new way for you to preview (the traditional definition is “scrub through”) your recorded footage. iMovie uses a bit of iPhoto organization goodness, including those good old fashioned Events, to organize footage that you record. One of the things that I was glad to see though was that iMovie will recognize multiple hard drives, including external ones, and allow you to choose to save your footage on there. Considering the hefty size of video, it’s nice to see Apple pay attention to those details. As for how you get the footage in there, you could drag in the whole clip, but Apple has come up with a pretty interesting solution where you select footage the way you select text using the “skimming function” to preview the video and pick just the part you want to crop, and then drag it into a timeline. Though they may have taken this “text” thing a little far: the only way to view the timeline is in this new format which almost reads it like a word processor by wrapping the timeline onto new lines, which seems a little strange to me.

Still, I can’t help but have the feeling that this new release of iMovie limits it, in a way, to focusing on these type of “shorter” projects where you crop out pieces of your footage and make small things like that. I’d have a hard time seeing a particularly long movie being generated in this app, after all, the timeline in the project builder would scroll pretty far down. This is partially reinforced by the built-in integration of YouTube, which can only accept up to 10 minutes per upload anyway. There undoubtedly are some iMovie users who are going to prefer the more traditional timeline interface, meaning that they’re going to have to stick with iMovie HD 6 or bump themselves up to Final Cut Express.

Steve made it pretty apparent that iDVD is not one of their top apps anymore, when he introduced it by saying that “there are some people who still want to burn DVDs” even though Apple has announced their exciting new .Mac Web Gallery (see below). You iDVD users get 10 more themes, a few performance enhancements, and new pro encoding that’s even more pro than the last time they touted pro encoding as a major feature. Beyond that, there’s nothing else to see here. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for, move along.

Apple has made some petty improvements to iWeb, but they don’t really focus much on what I wanted to see from the application. One of the things that I don’t like about iWeb is how they sort of cheat the HTML process by outputting a good deal of the text as images along with the rest of the page. Furthermore, the application is rather under-featured, and has (in my opinion) the worst interface of the five iLife apps. By relegating almost everything in there to the Inspector window and iLife Media Browser, iWeb reeks as though it was supposed to be an iWork app. The new update doesn’t seem as though they cleaned up anything in the app, they just dropped a few additional features into the glob, and they all seem to be by Google. iWeb has support for Google Maps embeds and other kind of “Web widgets” to embed, and for some strange reason which I still haven’t deciphered, tightly integrates with the Google AdSense moneymaking machine to let you display Google ads on those precious AdSense pages. Sounds like Eric Schmidt is pulling a few strings from his position on Apple’s board. The real problem with iWeb is that Apple has exclusively marketed it to the folks who are idiots when it comes to traditional web design. For the growing population of people (like me) who are actually sort of familiar with web design, iWeb seems like a silly joke. Personally, I would recommend a slightly more powerful app like RapidWeaver over iWeb (full review of RapidWeaver coming later this month).

I never thought I’d say this when GarageBand was first released in 2004, but GarageBand is actually the iLife application that I use most often, particularly because I use it to edit episodes for two podcasts that I do. This is why the only thing I was rooting for in the new iLife was some new features for podcasters, or at the very least, some new jingles and stuff, and so you can imagine my disappointment when us podcasters got nada this go around. The only real major feature to come out of here is something called Magic GarageBand (iLife ‘05 brought us Magic iMovie, iLIfe ‘06 brought Magic iDVD, and now we’ve got Magic GarageBand), which is one of the more elusive new iLife features, but I think I’ve got it figured out. If I’ve got it right, you open Magic GarageBand, and you get a stage, where you can pick sort a music genre, and then assign up to five software instruments to the spots on the stage. Those instruments will automatically play some loop or whatever source it uses to play a randomly selected string of music in the style you chose. Essentially, the computer is automatically writing and performing a song for you, which is enough to totally creep me out. You can then choose to play along with the virtual band in the main spotlight, or click “Create Project” to have the music playing be outputted into a regular GarageBand file so you can use it to build on for a new song. I’m not sure what to think of this feature quite yet until I can get my hands on it, but it seems as though this is aimed at the kind of people like me who are too braindead to pick good loops for a new song and just want someone to pick some for them. You know, I can almost come up with a situation where that could be useful…

Apple may be proud of their new release of iLife ‘08, and I’m definitely glad to see that they haven’t let it go by the wayside, however there’s nothing in this new package that really is calling on an urge to spend $80 to upgrade, and for the time being, I’m probably going to stick with the iLife ‘06 that came with my computer.

.Mac was heavily rumored to have major updates coming after it was announced that it would be going down this morning during the keynote, particularly in light of Steve Jobs saying at May’s All Things D conference that .Mac needed some updating. However, either the updating he talked of hasn’t come quite yet or Steve Jobs decided that he made an overstatement to Walt Mossberg, because they sure didn’t do that much today. Now, they bumped up the storage on .Mac to 10 GB combined e-mail+iDisk storage, which is definitely more up-to-date than the 1 GB they had before. Still, though, for $100/year? There’s a webhost called WebHostingBuzz which I’ll be switching to once my current hosting contract expires which offers 300 GB for $48/year, less than half of .Mac’s annual cost. Furthermore, Yahoo! and Gmail both offer pretty good sized inboxes for the amazing bargain price of FREE. The only other thing that Apple has added is this thing called .Mac Web Gallery, which is touted as a fancy online thing for sharing photos and movies which has a lot of nice AJAX goodness, and also integrates with the iPhone. Apple has liked it so much that they claim that “you’ll never have to burn a DVD again.” They must live in a dream world when it comes to how many people use .Mac. Quite frankly, this .Mac Web Gallery, although spiffy and iPhone-integrated, still doesn’t make .Mac worth the $100/year premium, particularly when you can get a Flickr Pro account for only $25/year. Apple really needs to get their act together and make .Mac more attractive, either by awesome new features, a more affordable price point, or both.

iWork ‘08 didn’t get as much attention from Steve Jobs as iLife ‘08 did, but it actually got me pretty excited. Now, my excitement could partially be fueled by my hatred for the slow, clunky, and not-yet-Universal Microsoft Office, but this new version of Apple’s productivity suite is really exciting. iWork ‘08 now finally includes a spreadsheet application, called Numbers, which now can really define iWork ‘08 as a viable competitor to the Microsoft Office suite, and also finally completely fills in the last gap towards fully replacing AppleWorks (did you know that page is still up on Apple’s website?). Further updates to Keynote make the application that much more powerful and beautifully amazing, and updates to Pages now help to bring it more on par with traditional word processing applications.

For a short while, Microsoft’s PowerPoint 2004 was the better looking application when comparing it to Keynote, but that only lasted until the end of 2004 because when Apple updated Keynote to version 2 in 2005, they brought it up to par with PowerPoint and then some. Now, Keynote ‘08 has been updated with so much sparkle and eye candy that any presentation can make an audience have their eyes glued to the screen and wondering how many graphics designers created it. The new builds and transitions look really cool–breathtaking would be a better word–and there’s so much more. How would you like to see a slide separate out into three panes with their own RGB colorspace, rotate a la Apple TV style, and come back together to form the new slide? Or have a slide burst into confetti and fall off the screen in bits and pieces? They’ve also got a number of new builds as well, and now they’ve enabled all of these builds to work with images or other objects as well as text.

Smart Builds is a new Keynote ‘08 that looks really cool. As an example, do you remember that part in Steve’s Macworld 2007 keynote where he had the iPhone’s iPod, Phone, and Safari icons revolving around in a cube? That was a Keynote ‘08 Smart Build. The idea is that when you create a Smart Build, you’re given a drop stack similar to iDVD’s Drop Zones where you can drop in a bunch of photos or other images–Keynote will then cycle through these using an animation that you select as builds on your slide. So you can have your images spin around in a cube, or rotate on a turn table, or even have the image on top be pulled off and put behind the other images in a stack. It’s really cool. In addition, Keynote ‘08 brings something called Action Builds, which lets you actually create your own animation. From where your image or text is, you can then specify where you want the object to go, and you can also specify a path (straight line or curved) and any points along that path that the image should stop at, and how fast. Keynote will create a build for each of these stops which you can then rearrange along with the other builds on your page to create some really customized animations for your slide. Finally, Keynote also provides voice-over recording–eliminating the need for an application like ProfCast–so that you can record yourself talking to a presentation and share your presentation with your audio.

Both Keynote and Pages now feature something called Instant Alpha. Have you ever added an image to your document or slide that has a white background or other custom background that just looks out of place? With instant alpha, you can click on a single part of the background or select various colors in your background and Pages/Keynote will eliminate the background, making the resulting image look as though it’s popping right out of the document or slide. I would definitely find this feature invaluable.

When Pages was first introduced in 2005, the biggest complaint for it was that it was too much focused on page-layout and not a good application for word processing, therefore not exactly positioning it as a replacement to Microsoft Word, just an addition to it. However, Apple has responded in Pages ‘08 by including a “word processing mode” alongside its “page layout mode” to make it much more attractive over Microsoft Word, and possibly threatening to lure me away from my favorite word processing app of all time, TextEdit. Still, themes is the name of the game when it comes to Pages, and Pages includes 80 word processing themes and 60 page layout themes. But what if you want to start a word processing document from scratch in Pages? Some of Pages ’08’s other new features help to make that a breeze.

First off, Pages introduces a format bar, which they call the “Contextual Format Bar”. They call it “contextual” because it rearranges the selection of tools available so that it always displays the most logical tools depending on what you’re doing. But die-hard word processors can rejoice because the bar now adds pop-up menus for font and size, formatting, color, alignment, and much more. No more having to go into Apple’s text formatting palette and inspector windows to setup this stuff, it’s now all RIGHT THERE. Yes! But when you’re working with images, you get options like opacity and reflection; tables lets you select how many rows and columns, etc. Essentially, you’ll find yourself having to go to the clunky Inspector window much less often and going to the prettier and more convenient format bar much more often. Pages also brings along other essential word processing features, such as automatic list creation and change tracking. And of course, there’s a number of other nice features for you page layouters too.

But now, finally, Apple has stepped in and added a spreadsheets application to finally provide some competition against Excel and complete their revolution from AppleWorks. Even my parents can’t stand Excel, and are still using AppleWorks 6 for their spreadsheet application. I’m hoping to get them to change that with Numbers. However, Numbers is a different kind of spreadsheet application, because instead of giving you a huge spreadsheet with infinite rows going every which way, Numbers instead provides you with a clean palette for a sheet. You’re expected to add the “spreadsheet” part of it to the sheet yourself by adding a table to the page, and then sizing it yourself. In this way, Numbers feels a lot like Pages, except that you’re able to work with an infinite piece of white space instead of having it divide it into pages for you (for now). However, when you drag in the tables, you still get your typical spreadsheet. You can choose to have Numbers show or not show the letters and numbers if you want. One thing that I find attractive though is that the formula editor isn’t up on the top of the window or some other distant place, it pops up right next to the cell that you’re editing. Numbers has all your typical and non-typical formulas, including a panel which can list all the available formulas and how you how to use them.

The idea behind Numbers is not just to be an application for managing your spreadsheets, but also be able to present them with style. Therefore, Numbers borrows features straight out of Pages for generating Apple’s beautiful charts from your spreadsheets, being able to display multiple separate spreadsheets (they call it tables) per sheet, and even allowing you to drag in images through an iLife media browser and add captions. When you want to go and print your spreadsheet, Numbers provides a page layout view, similar to Excel 2004’s, along with a slider that can let you scale your content to fit a page, and you can continue to edit your data in this view. The graphics that Numbers prints out look so gorgeous that anyone else would have no idea that you generated all that from a spreadsheet application. Numbers is really an application that has all the spreadsheet horsepower of Excel, and is able to do quite a bit crunching the numbers, but also takes a number of cues from Pages for producing beautiful, great looking documents from your data.

All in all, iWork ‘08 is for the first time a complete package for getting the things you need to get done for work, and is a real competitor against Microsoft Office. However, since the majority of the world uses Microsoft Office, iWork is also fully compatible and can import and export Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, both the old ones and ones in the new Office Open XML format seen in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows. And at $79, that’s a pretty good deal considering that Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac costs $150 for the Educational Discount version! iWork ‘08 is a pretty darn solid upgrade and I’m definitely willing to spend my $80 to get those apps on my computer.

Incidentally, I highly recommend you check out PreviewCast #042, which we recorded right after yesterday’s announcements. It’s one of my favorite episodes that we’ve ever done, and so I highly recommend you take a listen.

Tags: 2008, announcements, Apple, documents, GarageBand, hardware, iDVD, iLife, iMac, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, iWork, Keynote, Mac, Microsoft Office, movies, Numbers, Pages, photos, podcasting, presentations, PreviewCast, Software, Special Event, spreadsheets, Steve Jobs, web design