Over the weekend, Apple hit us Mac owners with a slew of updates for their iLife ’09 suite of applications, all of which were described by Software Update as providing little more than stability improvements and minor issue resolution. It would seem that Apple was being modest with its descriptions, however, especially regarding iMovie 8.0.1, which brings some new features and major fixes to the video editing software.

Custom Location Coordinate Support

iMovie ’09 has a large built-in library of popular travel destinations and landmarks, but sometimes you want to be more specific than they allow, or you’re filming in a place rather off the beaten path. Now you can input your own geolocation information, via latitude and longitude coordinates. Because, if you’re filming absolutely nothing in the middle of nowhere, you want to be accurate about it.

Additional Export to HD Options

The proliferation of HD video means that more and more people are wanting the ability to easily export their movies in formats that are compatible with popular video sites like YouTube. You can now Share to YouTube or Export video at 1280×720, which is full 720p HD, in case you weren’t aware. I still don’t think YouTube’s HD backend is robust enough to make it truly usable, but at least now you can inflict stuttering video on your unsuspecting audience, if that’s what makes you happy.

Keyboard Shortcut for “Split Clip” Command

Better, easier editing control is nothing to sneeze at, even if it is only the introduction of a single keyboard shortcut. Being able to press “Command + Shift + S” instead of digging about in the menu should save cut-happy editors a ton of time.

In addition to the feature additions mentioned above, the fix also solves an ugly issue which affected the playback quality of 1080i video when exported to iDVD or Quicktime. That means you no longer have to add in the additional step of fixing the footage in other apps following an export.

Apple, next time you add such obvious improvements, instead of just poking about under the hood, don’t be so modest. We promise not to think of you as any less mysterious.

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It’s been a heady few months. The updates to iWork ’09 and iLife ’09 have, for the most part, been as impressive and inspiring as we’ve come to expect from Apple. I upgraded both suites the very second I could. I can’t tell you how much I love these products.

Except…iWeb ’09. (Liam looks to the ceiling, gathers his thoughts…tries not to get agitated.)

If you didn’t already know, iWeb is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website authoring tool. It’s an end-to-end solution that makes it supremely easy to create a complete, sort-of-professional-looking website from scratch. Only, I have some issues with it. Where to begin…

I should begin by explaining something: I’m not a “lite” user. I’ve been developing websites and web applications for over a decade, and I’ve become accustomed to the power and flexibility offered by the like of Adobe Dreamweaver and (yes) Microsoft Expression Web. (Although, given the choice, I’d rather use Visual Studio 2008.) So I understand — I really do understand — that iWeb is not supposed to be competition for those other solutions. iWeb isn’t really for me. Nor does it try to be. It’s supposed to be something very simple, very easy to use. It’s supposed to be intuitive and accessible. It’s supposed to provide a seamless experience for anyone with even the tiniest bit of creative vision. And you know what — it does all the things it’s supposed to do. It just doesn’t do enough.

So, before I get agitated again, let’s take a look at the new release and feel thankful for what it does do.

The interface hasn’t change much, save for the introduction of a vertical panel along the right-hand side of the window, called the Media Browser. This gives easy one-click access to Audio, Photos and Movies on your Mac. Nothing the Media Inspector didn’t do before, except for the final tab – Widgets.

Widgets

Widgets make it quick and easy to add rich-media to web pages.

MobileMe Gallery

While the Gallery pages iWeb creates always have allowed users to hook-in to their .Mac or MobileMe galleries, this widget makes it possible to add a single, self-contained gallery-link to a page without the need to use iWeb’s more cumbersome “My Albums” section to your site. What you get is similar to the Events view in iPhoto; a square panel that shows thumbnails of photos in your chosen MobileMe Gallery. When you pass your mouse over the panel, you get different thumbnails of the photos that lie within. Clicking will open a new page that loads the original MobileMe gallery.

YouTube

Exactly what you’d expect. You paste a link to a chosen YouTube video into a popup dialogue box. It embeds the video on your page.

Google Maps

I really like this Widget. It doesn’t move the earth, it does precisely what you’d expect, but it takes the hassle out of coding these things by hand. Drag this Widget onto your page and you are presented with a sheet asking for the address you want to display. You can set zoom level, and choose which user-controls are available (such as zoom controls or the Google Maps search bar).

Google AdSense

Precisely what proportion of typical home-users are Google AdSense customers is an interesting question. I would hazard a guess it’s really not so many. In which case, this seems like a tip of the hat at providing something useful to more advanced users. Except I cannot see iWeb being used as a tool-of-choice by sufficiently advanced users (and by that, I’m referring to anyone who wants to create a truly decent, individual website — but more on that later).

iSight Photo

You could have done this before using PhotoBooth. Only now it’s built-in to iWeb. This widget starts you iSight camera and allows you to take a photo for instant-inclusion in your web page.

iSight Movie

Precisely the same as the iSight Photo option above. Only with movies.

Countdown

I could see this being popular with websites announcing upcoming weddings and birthdays. In short — completely pointless and not exactly something the websphere was crying-out for. Still, it’s something new. Enjoy selecting your birthdate for next year and watching it automagically work out the number of seconds between now and then. And count them down. (meh)

RSS Feed

Finally! A truly useful widget that was not previously easily-done. Except there is a catch — it doesn’t create an RSS feed from content in your page; it imports a feed from outside your site. If that’s what you want to do, this is a nice and simple way of making that happen.

HTML Snippet

Ironically, this is the most powerful widget of the lot. It allows you to construct your own HTML and generate pretty much anything you want. Of course, Apple expects you to be doing nothing more advanced than adding someone else’s banner, visitor tracking button or analytics script. If you want to embed anything more fancy than that – why on earth are you using iWeb?

Nothing to See Here…Move Along…

After the initial excitement with Widgets fades, you’ll realize there’s nothing else of any real added-value in this version of iWeb. There are only two new themes — “Leaf Print” and “Fine Line” — that would have been impressive in 1997. Today they look rubbish. Oh sure, they’re tidy and simple. But they’re not particularly exciting or fresh. Apple must know this — after all, they’re never gonna publish websites using those themes, so I don’t know why they imagine it’s alright to foist them upon the rest of us.

There I go being a power user again. I’m sure Aunty Mavis would just love Leaf Print (rolls eyes).

Going to Press

The publishing options have been expanded somewhat. As well as the option to publish to MobileMe, you can also publish directly to a third party hosting service of your choice using the FTP connectivity new to iWeb ’09. The process is simple.

Once you’ve entered and successfully tested your FTP login details, it’s business as usual.

I Do Facebook, Too!

Since iPhoto ’09 so nicely integrates with Facebook, it seems the iWeb developers felt they had to do something — anything — to get in on the action. Sounds interesting…what could they possibly do, though?

Imagine it — by hooking-in iWeb to a Facebook account, the possibilities are endless! You could scrape your Facebook Wall updates into your personal website, link your Facebook/iPhoto galleries with your iWeb site so changes in one propagate automagically to the others, synchronize your iWeb blog with Facebook’s Notes, synchronize your Applications to publish their updates to your iWeb site, synchronize your Facebook Status Updates with your iWeb home page…actually, the more you think about it, the more exciting it becomes! The possibilities just go on and on.

Unfortunately, it seems iWeb’s developers weren’t thinking about any of these possibilities, because the Facebook integration we get in this upgrade amounts to nothing more than the following line, published to your Facebook Wall, whenever you make changes to your website.

And here start the problems I find in iWeb ’09…

Crazy URLs

A perennial complaint (really — Google it — you’ll find a lot of people complaining about this for years now). Whether you publish to MobileMe or your own web server, iWeb still insists on creating bonkers-crazy long URLs. And there’s just no excuse for this, there really isn’t. For example, my personal website is http://www.liamcassidy.co.uk and my iWeb website was originally named “liamcassidy.co.uk”.

The effect this had on the final published site was a URL to a home page that looked like this:
http://www.liamcassidy.co.uk/liamcassidy.co.uk/home.html

I’ve since changed the site name to something shorter, but it’s still utterly ridiculous that iWeb doesn’t provide the option — just the option — to override this crazy URL structure/naming convention. Apple, I have a humble suggestion for you — not everyone wants to publish to MobileMe. Let your customers decide what’s best for them, and don’t make them suffer this laziness! A simple toggle in the Preferences ought to disable this kind of silliness so anyone more competent than Aunty Mavis will feel less embarrassed by the addresses iWeb spits out. This sort of thing is entirely avoidable. It’s simply shocking Apple hasn’t done anything about it.

Obsolete Themes

No one with any kind of appreciation for contemporary design, or accessibility concerns, is going to use the pre-built Themes that ship with iWeb. A very tiny select few look beautiful — but they’re still lacking. iWeb ’08 shipped with some nice new themes but, unfortunately, they dated quickly. The stingy two new additions in iWeb ’09 are laughable.

Nasty Markup

OK, this is something only more experienced web developers will care about so I won’t bang-on about it too much. It’s worth mentioning because 1) other WYSIWYG editors manage far cleaner code, and 2) there’s nothing semantic about this markup. There aren’t even any helpful comments to guide the curious. The CSS markup is packed-to-bursting with redundant markup (example: “border-top: 0px”, “border-right: 0px”, “border-bottom: 0px”…you get the idea.)

Painful Publishing

It takes forever to publish pages. Whether you use MobileMe or your own FTP address, publishing a simple 6-page site can take five or more minutes. This is ridiculous, given that any other (free) FTP software can get your files published in much, much less time. Not the “…within moments…” promised by the happy voiceover in the iWeb tour video. Oh no.

The fastest way to publish your site is to not publish it at all — by selecting the confusingly-titled “Publish to Local Folder” option. This dumps all the relevant web pages and assets into a folder of your choosing on your hard drive. This takes seconds, but then it’s up to you to get those files to a server somewhere.

As a sidenote, this may be the best way to overcome the problem with the crazy long-URL’s. Publish the site to a local folder, then use another FTP solution to upload the files to your own web server. You’ll have to mess around with links here and there to make sure the whole site works as planned, but at least you won’t have to deal with six-mile-long web addresses.

Punishing Publishing

Oh yes, and just a final word on publishing. If you don’t use MobileMe as your hosting platform, you can forget about your blog’s comments working properly. And kiss goodbye to your blog’s Search functionality. That’s gonna go, too. Seems Apple really wants you to use MobileMe.

Tough Love

It might sound like I’m bashing iWeb, but if I am, it’s only in the way a pushy parent might berate an under-achieving child for not doing as well as they could. iWeb could be, and should be, a far more powerful and impressive tool than it is today. I was expecting some interesting and exciting things with this upgrade — as it turns out, what I got wasn’t worth the wait.

I know Apple is not trying to compete with other more professional web authoring solutions, but that doesn’t excuse sheer laziness when it comes to upgrading this software. iWeb has the potential to be a killer-application. Seriously — plenty of professional web developers would be happy to use it if only it didn’t suck so bad. And, in truth, there aren’t so many fixes required, either.

Obviously, the Themes are a joke. Where Apple could shine here is build an iWeb Themes gallery, much the same as the Web Apps gallery that countless iPhone owners (myself included) practically lived-in until native applications could be installed on that device. Apple already features third-party developer software on its own website — why not showcase the best iWeb themes, too? Or, better still — why not create some really breathtaking themes worthy of that lugubrious (and indelible) credit, “Made on a Mac”?

As well as vastly-improved themes, add a long-needed fix to the crazy URL issue, CSS editing and the ability to fine-tune the (cleaner, semantic) HTML markup, and you have a web creation tool that is still simple and intuitive, yet doesn’t try to compete with the big-kids already dominating the playground. If that means releasing a standalone “iWeb Pro” package that does for my websites what iWorks does for my documents, I’d gladly pony-up the cash.

In the end, “simple and easy” doesn’t have to mean “crude and clunky.” Apple proved that with Pages and Numbers in iWork. The updates to iPhoto and iMovie (evolutionary and revolutionary, respectively) are nothing short of breathtaking. In this company of Kings, though, iWeb is an embarrassing, backward cousin.

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Unlike iWork ’09, the iLife suite is not available as a digital trial download, so users haven’t yet been able to test the software live on their own machines. iLife has also evaded piracy thus far for the same reason, although it likely won’t do so for much longer.

iLife ’09 was announced at Macworld as part of Phil Schiller’s keynote address, alongside iWork ’09, and the 17″ aluminum Macbook Pro. It features a number of improvements, enhancements, and changes compared to the last iteration of the home media suite. iPhoto ’09 received considerable attention at Macworld, since it got what are arguably the most significant changes of the bunch. The program now includes facial recognition support, allowing it to identify and sort photos based on who is in them, and geotagging support, allowing photos to be organized by location and/or vacation destination.

Besides iPhoto, Garage Band also received functional updates, including a new “Learn to Play” mode, and instructional videos from professional musicians like Sting. iMovie ’09 now offers users both audio and video tracks in edit mode, a stabilization filter for unsteady or shaky video, and animated travel maps based on where video was shot.

The suite retails for $79.99 for a single user license, while a five user family pack is available for $99.99. I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to find out just how well that image recognition works. Definitely going to see if I can fool it with a rubber nose and fake teeth.

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When highlighting the new updates to iLife ’09 today, Phil Schiller probably spent the most time highlighting the new features in iPhoto. There’s lots to like in this ’09 update and the crowd was definitely “wowing” at some of the cool stuff that was demonstrated.

First up are two brand-new features to help you organize your photos. Apple has had a really positive response to the Events feature in iPhoto ’08 and now Faces and Places will allow you to further organize your pictures by who appears in the picture and where it was taken.

Faces

There are two aspects to Faces in iPhoto ’09. The first is face detection which allows iPhoto to automatically discover all the faces that appear in the photo. This allows iPhoto to present the people to you for identification, but also shows up in other features like slideshows where the photos are automatically centered and cropped so that the faces in the frame will be visible and prominent. The tech worked beautifully in the demo we saw at the Keynote.

The second part of Faces is face recognition. iPhoto ’09 will learn to identify people in your photos as you tag the faces in photos. This feature is hard to evaluate without trying on your own photos, but the demo is impressive. Schiller was quick to point out that no facial recognition system is perfect, but Apple feels that they have the best software technology available on the desktop. It was impressive to see how seamlessly it all integrated.

Once you start tracking faces, those people show up on your corkboard organizer with snapshots for each person (centered and cropped to focus on the face detected in the picture, of course).

This feature is going to be great for organizing all my pictures of the kids, but I suspect that iPhoto may get confused by pictures of the same person at different ages, say from age 3 to age 14. We’ll see how it works out in practice.

Places

iPhoto ’09 also lets you organize your pictures by where you took the photo by using geotags from a GPS-enabled camera, or an iPhone 3G. You can also add geotags to photos that do not already have them. This feature is also incredibly well-integrated into the iPhoto app. To add a geotag, you can select a spot on the map or just type in the name of a location. iPhoto will automatically georeference the location to nearby landmarks and the city and country.

You can then use a map or an iTunes-style browser to drill-down and filter photos on locations in your library. Places is integrated into photo books as well. As an example, iPhoto will automatically generate maps with pins for the location of the photos on that page in your book.

Facebook & Flickr Sharing

iPhoto also adds new sharing capabilities that integrate directly with two popular photo sites — Flickr for your good photos and Facebook for all the crappy snapshots of your friends. The Facebook integration is particularly cool. iPhoto uses the face recognition technology to automatically tag your photos with the Facebook profile of your friends. You need to enter their full name and email address so that iPhoto can link them with a Facbook profile. The cool thing is that this feature works both ways. If someone tags a picture on Facebook that you have uploaded from iPhoto, that tag will automatically get synced back down to iPhoto. You can then choose to track that person in Faces and iPhoto will use face recognition to automatically tag pictures in the future.

The Flickr integration is cool as well, and a definite blow to the well-liked FlickrExport from ConnectedFlow.

The Rest

iPhoto also adds some enhanced editing features that look like they were taken from Aperture. The color saturation sliders are particularly helpful in Aperture for bringing out highlights and making the sky look like something that actually resembles blue if you forgot your polarizing filter. I’d love to get some of that power in iPhoto.

There are also new themed slideshows that look absolutely fantastic. Shatter is going to blow your mind when you get chance to see it in action on the keynote video (up later today on apple.com). They use face detection to automatically center and crop your images so that you don’t end up with people out of the frame or other problems.

A Must Buy

I left the keynote address this morning with my wallet screaming to buy iLife ’09. Honestly, if iPhoto were the only app in the suite, I would probably still want iLife just for that. The face detection and recognition features give me some hope of organizing all my photos so that I can quickly find actual people in my library and geotagging with Places is an OCD dream. Facebook and Flickr pushes it over the top for me as I use those two sites extensively.

Check out the info on apple.com and share your impressions below.

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GarageBand ’09, the updated version of Apple’s popular software used by millions to play and record music, now gives budding musicians a fun new way to learn to play piano and guitar.

Basic Lessons

Basic Lessons let you learn the fundamentals at your own pace with Apple instructors in beautiful HD video synchronized to animated instruments and notation. You’re able to practice either the piano or guitar, playing through nine different lessons which prepare you for playing an entire song. Speed and repetition can be controlled until you’ve perfected the stage.

When ready to play the entire song, GarageBand allows you to do so with the full backing band. The video shown in the Keynote presentation looked to be of excellent quality, though it was noted that the piano lessons appear somewhat easier to follow than the guitar counterparts.

Artist Lessons

Artist Lessons feature original artists showing how to play their hit songs with everything from finger positions and techniques to the story behind the song. Each artist explains in the video how the song was written and what inspired it. You’re able to choose from lessons by popular artists including:

• Sara Bareilles
• Colbie Caillat
• John Fogerty
• Ben Folds
• Norah Jones
• Sarah McLachlan
• Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump
• OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder
• Sting

I’m surprised that John Mayer wasn’t present in the list of artists taking part — he does usually seem to pop up wherever Apple has room for him. Artist Lessons will be sold separately at the new GarageBand Lesson Store for $4.99 a pop, available inside the GarageBand ’09 application.

You are able to fully control the mix and instrumentation, so it’s simple to break down a professional track into the various constituents and hear each part in isolation. As with Basic Lessons, speed can be controlled to make picking up the song easier. Previews of each artist can be found at the GarageBand site, and Apple noted that new artists will be added to the list shortly.

It will be interesting to see how this feature takes off; I think it’s a good concept, and if budding musicians don’t find the price to be a barrier I’d expect it to become very popular.

Other Features

Two other new features also grace GarageBand ’09. The first is a new guitar amp with stomp-box effects, allowing you to re-create classic guitar rigs. Sounds include Brit Pop, Honky Tonk, Lowdown Blues, Seattle Sound, Stadium Solo, and Woodstock Fuzz. Different pedals can also be added and, in classic Apple style, a 3D recreation of your custom rig can be shown on screen.

The second additional feature is “Magic GarageBand Jam,” letting you play along with a virtual band that you create. You can change the sound of each instrument in the band, arrange each part individually and then, when you’re happy with how the band sounds, jam along with your own instrument. This would appear to be an excellent way of moving away from simply recording a track through GarageBand, toward using it as a recreational and ‘jamming’ tool.

Of course, all the original functionality of GarageBand remains intact. It still provides the renowned functionality for layering tracks, recording, and providing a simple ‘plug and play’ setup process.

Pricing & Availability

iLife ’09 will be available this month for a suggested retail price of $79, and Artist Lessons will be available through the GarageBand Lesson Store for $4.99 each.

iLife ’09 will require Leopard and the GarageBand Artist Lessons will only be available in select countries.

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