Apple iLife '06

Apple iLife '06
Apple iLife '06 adds new features and improves on already existing features, including better integration between applications. On the downside, some of the apps are RAM-hungry and support from Apple has dwindled since the last version. If you don't already have a version of iLife and you deal with digital media at all, you should get iLife '06.

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iPhoto 6's Adjust Palette
The Aperture-like Adjust Palette lets you change various aspects of your photos, including sharpness, saturation, brightness and contrast, and colour temperature. Even more interesting, if you have a .Mac account, you can share your photos by "photocasting" a public album. Your invited friends will see your shared album as if it were theirs; similarly, the albums will be automatically updated as you update yours. They don't even need iPhoto; you can share photos with anyone who has an RSS reader.

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iPhoto 6's Effects palette
Professionals may scoff at the new Effects panel, a floating, translucent palette that offers one-click effects, but most amateur users will find it useful. Included effects are black and white, sepia tone, antique tone, fade colour, boost colour, matte, vignette, and edge blur.

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iMovie 6
iMovie 6 is more closely integrated with other applications in the suite. It's easy to pull in a GarageBand project as a soundtrack for your iMovie and equally easy to place an iMovie in a Web page that you've made in iWeb.

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iMovie 6
iMovie 6 lets you flex your filmmaking muscles -- in high def. iMovie 6 also gets iDVD-like themes and real-time previews of themes and effects. However, large projects with many transitions and clips can bog down all but the hardiest of Apple systems.

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iDVD 6
iDVD 6 supports 16:9 wide-screen movies and third-party DVD burners. You can switch easily between the standard 4:3 format and the wide-screen 16:9 format. iDVD 6 come with a number of themes and creating your DVD is as simple as dragging and dropping media.

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iDVD 6
iDVD 6 also has a Magic iDVD feature that takes your raw footage and photos and automatically creates a DVD. The price of this simplicity, though, is flexibility. For example, you can't choose which transitions will connect your scenes.

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iWeb
With iWeb, you can create entire Web sites, complete with blogs and podcasts, by choosing a template and dragging and dropping photos and other objects. It's probably the easiest way to make a Web site with all of these elements. Though Apple wants you to pay into its .Mac subscription Web-hosting service, you can publish your site to any remote server. However, Web-design gurus will flinch at the huge and complex HTML code that iWeb creates.

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GarageBand 3
GarageBand 3 includes automatic ducking, great filters for voice recording, and integration with iChat, which lets you record interviews using iChat's voice feature, with the interviewee's voice on a separate track.

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GarageBand 3
In this third version of GarageBand 3, Apple has added an interesting podcast-creation tool. Once you create your podcast, you can easily publish it to the Web page you made in iWeb. The downside to using GarageBand 3 as a podcast studio, though, is that it's a resource-intensive application with heavy RAM requirements and gigabytes of sound files that fill up your hard drive.

See the full review of Apple iLife '06 by CNET's editors.

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