All right, I’m just gonna come out and say it. If you’re a “digitally creative person” (in other words, you’re serious about digital photography, video, or music) you need a Mac. If your idea of digital creativity is recording TV shows you missed while watching other TV shows, well, you deserve your Windows Media Center PC. Don’t feel like you have a creative bone in your body? The Mac’s iLife suite of “digital lifestyle” applications will surely help you look like you do. iLife ‘04 contains iTunes (digital music jukebox and portal to the popular iTunes Music Store), iPhoto (digital photos), iMovie (video editing), iDVD (burn your movies and photo slideshows onto DVD with professional flair), and a new member, GarageBand (recording studio). What makes iLife so special? All the applications (each one as good as they come at doing what they do) are integrated – all your digital media is accessible within each application – no scrounging around the hard drive looking for photos, movie clips, or music. Here’s the highlights of the major improvements to each application.

iTunes. Since iTunes was updated fairly recently to include a Windows version and better integration with the on-line iTunes Music Store, there’s no changes in iLife ’04.

iPhoto. In previous versions, once you filled your Library with, say, 2000 photos, performance suffered dramatically. iPhoto 4 is designed to handle up to 25,000 photos, and even on a Mac with average speed, moves through its functions with lightning speed. With a new slideshow “toolbar” you can easily review your photos, assign a rating to them, and delete and rotate as you go along. Managing your Library is much easier, thanks to quick-access buttons - all photos taken in a given year, taken in the last year, the last imported roll – and “Smart Albums”, where you define the criteria, and the albums are updated on the fly. All Macs on your network can share all their photos through iPhoto as well.

iMovie. It’s good technique when importing digital video to start importing a bit before and after the real action of the scene. This gives you extra frames to use to fade into and out of the scene. But, sometimes you don’t need those frames when editing. Before, getting rid of them meant cutting the ends off. In iMovie 4, you just grab the end of the clip and drag inward. This “hides” the frames, but they’re always there if you want them back. iMovie 4 also offers more increased speed, more precise audio control, new transitions and titles (including the scrolling “text on space” from the Star Wars movies), and expanded options to share your masterpieces, including exporting to cell phones and PDAs. You can use your iSight web camera as video source, and everything runs faster as well.

iDVD. In addition to the 24 DVD menu themes from previous versions, iDVD 4 gets 20 new themes – each created with style by graphics professionals. In iDVD you can create sub-menus, like many Hollywood DVDs have. To stay organized, there’s a DVD Map to see where everything is connected. At highest resolution, you can record up to two hours on a single 4.7GB disc.

So, what would all this cost you in the Windows PC world? Over $300. And, remember that none of those Windows applications are integrated with each other. iLife ’04 retails for (if you don’t get it all bundled free with every new Mac) - $49. GarageBand alone is worth the price of the ticket. Oh, we didn’t get to GarageBand? See the column HERE.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski