Apple's August Announcements – What Was Really Important

On Tuesday, Apple introduced new iMacs, and new iLife and iWork software as well as some enhancements to their .Mac service. They did a nice job of setting low expectations and then over delivering. Let's take a high level view and break down what was really important in what they announced, starting with the best parts.

Brand New Stuff

Numbers. iWork got a third program added to the suite which does spreadsheets in the Apple style. This has been a long desired and speculated about program that will go far helping iWork meet and beat Microsoft Office. Now that there is an Excel counterpart, I think this program puts iWork over the hump as a viable MS Office alternative.

The devil will be in the details as far as how seamless the experience is swapping files back and forth with Excel users on both Mac and PC. Since Excel drives many businesses, this will be a critical issue to watch.

iMovie. It's not a brand new program, but it has been entirely reconfigured so it should be in this category. Rather than making incremental improvements as Apple did with the other iLife programs, it looks as if they tossed the old iMovie HD away and swapped in this one. Two interesting differences: You can see all your video files at once in a library view and you can import video from the newer flash drive based video cameras. This expansion of video camera interoperability will really benefit the iMovie enthusiast how has been wanting a newer camera.


Nicely Upgraded Stuff

New iMacs. These are what everyone was expecting to see and Apple delivered with a base hit. Nothing radical in the makeover: just new materials, faster chips, a new keyboard layout and lower prices. I'm not fond of the black trim under the glass. It smacks of recent car design where the designers can't get the inside and outside to match, so they paint the glass black underneath the windows.

Web Gallery. If you use .Mac, this is a huge improvement over how your photos and movies were displayed on your site. Now when you publish photo albums and movies, the graphics and interface has been brought up to date. There is a bunch of interactivity for the viewer to take advantage of, including how to view large images and thumbnails. My favorite is the Mosaic view that allows a large image next to the rest in thumbnail view, bringing it up to par with Flickr.

There are also new functions in iPhoto and iWeb that make building a Web Gallery ultra easy.

iPhoto. The main event here is a new view for the Library, called Events. These are essentially containers like Film Rolls were, but now they are based on date ranges and can have a large interactive icon. When you view the icons together, you can see more of your growing library at a glance. I expect upgrading a previous library will be tedious.

Other nice iPhoto perks are more editing controls and better printing and ordered product options.


Incremental Upgrades: iWeb, GarageBand, and Pages. Apple's software programs are usually pretty damn good, which creates a problem for them. When they work well, there is not too much more for them to do. The younger ones like iWeb make bigger strides with each new version, but older ones like Keynote don't have much room to make big splashy improvements. These programs had nice updates that don't in themselves make a huge difference unless that is the program you love and use all day.

Minor Improvements. At first glance, it looks as if iDVD and Keynote just got freshened up with new templates. If you are bored with the old templates, the new ones might put you over the top. Personally, I look forward to getting new iDVD themes.


What Happened?!! I really hoped for a whole new .Mac service program with these announcements. That doesn't mean it won't happen soon, but if they were going to do it before Leopard, this was their chance. The Web Gallery is nice and the storage space bump (10GB) is necessary to use it, but I was hoping for this level of attention across the board. Oh well…

What Didn't Happen?!! The Mac Mini is still alive and kicking despite rumors of its impending death. It got small speed bumps, but no price drop. At least they have Core 2 Duo chips now.

Let us know what your thoughts were on the announcements in the Comments section below.

DIG DEEPER

Direct links to information on Apple's web site
New iMacs
iLife
iLife 31 Minute Video Introduction
iLife Tutorials with Video
iWork

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