Tuesday Tech Talk #65

Hello all, this is going to be a different variation from the regular Triple T. Today I just wanted to summarize the announcements at Apple’s Back to the Mac event today.

iLife ’11

Today Apple released iLife ’11 which has some enhanced new features for iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand.

iPhoto gives you the ability to really work in full screen mode in a whole new way than before for Events, Faces, and Places. It also allows you to now email photos from within iPhoto instead of opening up Apple Mail. Also enhancements to Facebook sharing, you can now read comments to your photos from right within iPhoto and it has a robust slideshow theme for instant photo viewing.

iMovie gives you the ability to select a certain area of audio and edit it say like low audio. It also offers one step effects and people finder so you can search for people in video on your Mac similar I guess to Faces in iPhoto. Another cool feature is you can take your home movies and create a movie trailer video out of them which is really cool and it has some news and sports themes as well.

Garageband has 2 notable features, one is Groove Matching which basically will sync up say your drums and guitars so they are in beat with each other and Flex Time which can take a certain instrument and extend it out a bit. Also has new piano and guitar lessons and a feature to track your progress on learning it called, “How did I play?”

Biggest thing for me is probably iPhoto. I do like the ability to run it in full screen while I go through my Events so that is nice to have. I also like that I no longer have to open up Mail to send photos. I use Gmail so really using Mail is a pain in the butt with iPhoto ’09 so I will probably get iLife just on iPhoto alone and for $49 for the upgrade, that is not a bad price. The other 2 I really don’t use much but I will probably dabble with iMovie with its new features.

FaceTime for Mac

Apple also announced a beta version of FaceTime for Mac where you can video chat with users of the iPhone 4 and new iPod touch and now with other Mac users also using FaceTime. I haven’t used it yet to see how it compares to say regular iChat video, which I am sure once FaceTime comes out of beta, it will be integrated with iChat.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Apple also demoed a few features of the next OS for the Mac that will be coming out next Summer. The biggest thing will be a MacApp store similar to the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad store. This will be an alternative method of course for distributing software to Mac users and does NOT replace the traditional method of buying boxed software or downloading directly from the software company itself. But, it will notify you of any software updates which is nice. Also they are bringing 2 new features, Mission Control and Launch Pad. Mission Control allows you to view what all is open in one easy to view screen. Launch Pad makes it easier to launch apps, very similar to how you browse and launch apps on an iPhone/iPod touch or iPad.

MacBook Air

Finally the “One More Thing” announcement was the new MacBook Air. It now comes with flash based storage instead of a traditional hard drive allowing it for “instant on” like the iPad. It comes in 2 varieties, a 11.6” screen 1.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM and 64 GB of flash storage for $999 or $1199 for one with 128 GB. The other model is a 13.3” one with 1.86 GHz with 2 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage for $1299.

To me the MacBook Air is on the pricey side compared to what you get. I would probably opt for a MacBook model which has more of a traditional hard drive but is heavier if I were laptop shopping in the sub-$1000 market.

Well that is going to do it for this edition of Tuesday Tech Talk and see you all next week for a regular edition of Triple T.