iLife '06

I stopped in at the La Cantera Apple Store yesterday to look at the 12" PowerBooks and 12" iBooks. Wouldn't you know it, the Intel iMacs are already in stock and on display for people to try out Apple's latest offerings. The first thing I noticed was that the image on the screen was polarized - like it was a negative instead of a positive. One of the Mac Specialists taught me that this feature can be turned on from System Preferences - Universal Access - Display. I liked the effect it had, but unfortunately the polarization effect is not limitd to Mac OS X only, but also web content as well.

First of all, as you would imagine, the Intel iMacs are very fast. I tried doing some of the things that Steve did during his keynote, for example, I opened iPhoto, shrunk the thumbnails as small as they would go and started scrolling. As far as I could tell, it didn't miss a beat. I tried the full screen edit mode from iPhoto and thought that was excellent. I also played a little with iWeb which I thought made it extrememly easy to create web pages that look professional (if not original) and provided the much touted one-touch publishing that services like Blogger and Moveable Type are currently offering.

I launched Garage Band, but since I'm not very familiary with the application to begin with I couldn't tell what the new applications were and if they were any good. I did watch the video provided from Apple Quick Tours - Garage Band and found the podcasting features to be really intriguing. The only downside that I can forsee is a lot of bad podcasts.

On one of my recent visits to the Apple store, one of the Mac Specilists told me that iLife '05 users would not have to pay the full $80 USD for iLife '06, that there would be an update available for $9.99 USD. I hope that's true because I would love to have some of the applications now available. Forunately, when I pick up the 12" PowerBook next week it will already be pre-loaded with iLife '06.