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Now that the keynote address at MacWorld 2009 has come and gone, let’s look at the 5 most exciting announcements to come out of the event.
1. iLife ‘09
- With the new iLife ‘09, Apple introduced plenty of great features to justify the $79 upgrade. In iPhoto, you can now manage your photos by people’s faces. You can draw a box around a face, tell iPhoto the name of that face, and then iPhoto will start to learn who’s who in each photo! (Finally, there’s a regular use for face-recognition software.)
- There’s also photo tagging for Facebook and Flickr. Facebook is retroactive, meaning your facial tags can appear in photos you took years ago.
- iPhoto also lets you tag photos by location and view them on Google Maps. The program has added several new themes, as well.
- iMovie has several new features, including automatic image stabilization (a great feature when you can’t do this with your camera), animated travel maps (just like the ones you see in Indiana Jones movies), and instant slo-mo or speedup.
- GarageBand has one of the coolest new features: real music lessons! It appears the program comes with nine basic lessons to teach guitar and piano. Once you feel confident enough to try a real song, you can download new lessons from the GarageBand Store. These lessons are taught by people such as John Fogerty, Sting, and Sarah McLachlan. It appears they will run $5/song.
- iLife ‘09 ships in late January.
In addition to iLife, there’s:
2. iWork ‘09
- Each application has seen feature enhancements. Keynote now has “magic move” transitions, where you set up your slides that have objects in them, and Keynote magically determines which objects to animate and how to best animate them.
- Keynote also has new themes and transitions for text, objects, and charts.
- Finally, Keynote can integrate with the iPod Touch, which can show the presentation on screen and be used as a remote.
- Pages has added a full-screen view to take away distractions when writing, along with a much improved outliner, allowing for dragging and dropping of sections and easy objection insertion.
- Pages also integrates with MathType and EndNote now.
- Numbers can do a mail merge with Pages now, and best of all, features 250 functions, a significant update.
- Numbers has added table categories, similar to Excel’s pivot categories.
- Finally, iwork.com is in beta and will be a collaboration site where others can view your iWork documents and add comments, which the document author can then read.
- $79 upgrade and only $49 with the purchase of a new Mac.
3. Unibody MacBook Pro 17″
- The 17″ MacBook Pro was updated today and features the same unibody construction as the existing 15″ MacBook Pro. This makes the machine sturdier, thinner, and lighter.
- Finally there’s an anti-glare option at $50. This should make many people happy.
- The battery is now integrated (non-removable), which was necessary to bring the total thickness down to less than 1 inch.
- BUT, the battery now lasts up to 8 hours! Apple says this is the most significant new feature in the machine. It can be charged up to 1,000 times (which is roughly double the industry standard). It uses less than half the energy of a single light bulb.
- Dual GPUs and up to 8 GB RAM, plus other similar options as the 15″ MBP.
- Price remains at $2799 for the standard model.
4. iTunes
- Starting April 3rd, there will be pricing tiers for music (it’s what the music companies want).
- The new pricing structure will be $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29 (likely that old songs are cheapest, new but unpopular songs at $0.99, most popular songs at $1.29 — just my speculation).
- Starting today, 8 million songs with be DRM-free, and by the end of March, 100% of the songs will be DRM free.
- You can now purchase songs over 3G/Edge, not just WiFi!
5. Nothing Else
- Rumors sites had envisioned so many other products to be announced or demoed. Here’s a summary of what we didn’t see:
- Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
- A new Mac mini
- A new iMac or Mac Pro
- An iPhone nano
- An updated iPod
- An updated Apple TV/Home Media Center
What did you think of this year’s MacWorld? Were you happy with the new releases, or did the keynote underwhelm you? Are there new products you’re excited about that got released before the keynote? Let others know in the comments.
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Very nice recap. Much easier to read than all of the live blogs I was refreshing for the past hour.
iTunes is currently downloading all of my DRM free music that I already purchased once with DRM.
Glen’s last blog post..No Wii, Maybe PS3