impressive, but I don’t know if it is for me
Many other blogs will be talking about the introduction of the first mactel devices. Maybe because I just got a new Mac I’m not interested, or maybe because none of my software will run natively on them. The announcement that really got me interested yesterday was the new iLife announcement.
Now, I’ve got all the high-end versions of their apps (or equivalents). However, sometimes, it is just easier to toss a project into iDVD, rather than DVD Studio Pro. There certainly isn’t anything more useful than iPhoto. Even iMovie has its uses.
It really seems like the iLife suite is coming into its own now. The integration is getting really amazing, now that the iApps are finally taking advantage of CoreVideo and CoreImage plug-ins, I can see a lot more possibilities for the future.
The problem: podcasting. With the addition of iWeb and adding the podcasting mode to GarageBand as well as the photo-casting stuff they’ve added, the goal of this rev is obvious: make it easy for everyone to do blogging/podcasting/vidcasting/etc… Now, I think that is a pretty good goal with one exception: it is all based around .Mac. Now the iLife suite has always been trying to push people towards subscribing to .Mac before, but now they are ramming it down people throats. Why isn’t there a 1-step publish in iWeb to another website? Do iWeb pages require server-side components running on the .Mac servers?
I think that the podcasting features are very cool and very well done, but I don’t need them or want them. iWeb would be cool for an occasional web page, but I don’t need or want a .Mac account. The rest of the features are also very cool, but I don’t know if they are worth upgrading the software. Then I remember that the price is $79 which is the equivalent of going to a couple movies with my wife and I realize that the few features that are really interesting to me might be worth it…