A pretty major omission from my MacWorld 2007 predictions is iLife 07. No idea why my brain wasn’t tuned in to the fact that every MacWorld I remember seems to have brought an iLife release, so why would the year be any different? You could argue that with Leopard on the way iLife may come later in the year, and that was my view for a while, but I’ve changed my mind. Anyhow, regardless of when it does come out I want to discuss what I’d like to see in it.

I don’t really use iMovie or iDVD enough to have anything interesting to say about them. I used both twice in iLife 06 and each time it was a problem-free and rewarding experience. I have a lot more experience with the other iLife components so I’m going to concentrate on those, namely iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb & GarageBand.

[tags]MacWorld, Apple, iLife, iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb, GarageBand[/tags]

iTunes

At this stage I’ve lost count of how many times iTunes was updated in the last year. It seems like each time Steve Jobs gets up on stage he announces some new feature that requires an iTunes update. I doubt this MacWorld will be any different. Personally I’m expecting an iPhone and the iTV so we’re going to have to see an iTunes update to accommodate those. An interesting rumor I’ve heard is that song lyrics may become available within iTunes. I think this would be exceptionally cool and may even lead to the ability to search for songs by their lyrics. This is something I often want to do because I get a song stuck in my head that I really like and want to buy but just can’t remember the title!

What ever they do I really don’t expect them to deal with my biggest gripe with iTunes, not allowing you to use your iPod to sync un-DRMed content between your Macs. I’m not going to go into detail here because I’ve already expressed my views in my article iTunes 7 – Not The Success It Could and SHOULD Have Been.

iPhoto

I’m by no means a power user of iPhoto but I do use it to store, edit and organize any photos I take and I have no major complaints about it. Basically, it just works! I do have one complaint though, I noticed that you only seem to be able to ‘photocast’ to a .Mac account and not to a regular web server. This is just not good enough really considering how over-priced and utterly useless .Mac is (.Mac review in the works to back that up). If they fix anything it really should be this.

iWeb

Oh where to begin on this one! TBH I think the best thing they could do with it would be to bin it and start over. It is fundamentally flawed in how it works. Translating all the text on a web page into image files is just not acceptable in this day and age. It may have been cool in the 90s but thankfully most of the world has moved on. As long as their implementation is based on absolute positioned divs with images I see no use for iWeb. Like the photo casting feature in iPhoto, iWeb also suffers from an over-dependency on .Mac. This just adds to its uselessness. Anyhow, I’ll leave it at that for here, if you want more have a read of On Second Thoughts – iWeb Sucks.

GarageBand

I use GarageBand a lot. I record the IFAS podcast with it once a month as well as any audio comments I submit to other podcasts. I know nothing about music so I really can’t comment on any aspect of GarageBand other than the podcast studio. In general it just works and is easy to use but it does have one very annoying flaw; it won’t export straight to MP3. I always end up having to go via iTunes and that’s just a needlessly verbose way of doing things. No matter how much Apple may want us all to use AAC for our podcasts it’s just not going to happen because the entire planet does not use iTunes/iPod! It’s time for Apple to stop trying to rail-road podcasters into using their format and just accept that we, the podcasters, want to export straight from GarageBand to MP3.

Conclusions

For me the big thing Apple need to do is stop using iLife to try force Apple products and technologies onto users. They need to stop forcing AAC on us and stop ramming .MAc down our throats. .Mac is just WebDAV technology, let us use our own WebDAV servers if you are too incompetent to provide a reliable one of your own! They also need to have a good long re-think about iWeb. I doubt I’ll get my wish on any of these things, that’s why they will really have to pull a spectacular rabbit out of the hat to get me to fork out the cash for the upgrade. The one thing that would be likely to swing it for me would be a big revamp of the podcast studio in GarageBand.