Apple iLife ’06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION]
Apple iLife ’06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION]
- iPhoto 6 with blazing performance and new Photocasting
- iMovie HD 6 with new movie themes for adding spectacular motion graphics to movies
- iDVD 6 for authoring custom DVDs for today’s widescreen TVs
- iWeb, an innovative new application that makes it easy to create amazing websites
- Mac OS X v10.4.4 or later is required for iPhoto Photocasts and iMovie HD themes
iLife ’06 is the next generation of Apple’s award-winning digital lifestyle suite. It features iPhoto 6 with blazing performance and new Photocasting; iMovie HD 6 with new movie themes for adding spectacular motion graphics to movies; iDVD 6 for authoring custom DVDs for today’s widescreen TVs; and GarageBand 3, the complete solution for creating professional-sounding podcasts. iLife ’06 also introduces iWeb, an innovative new application that makes it easy to create amazing websites with photos, blogs, and podcasts and publish them on the Internet with a single click using .Mac. Now more than ever, it’s clear that the Mac is the ultimate platform for the digital lifestyle.iLife ’06 is the easiest way to make the most out of every bit of your digital life. Use your Mac to collect, organize and edit the various elements. Transform them into mouth-watering masterpieces with Apple-designed templates. Then share the magic moments in beautiful books, colorful calendars, dazzling
Rating: 
(out of 60 reviews)
List Price: $ 79.00
Price: $ 40.00
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Review by Michael A. Brown for Apple iLife ’06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION]
Rating:
I bought a new iMac G5 in November. Come January, not only is it outdated, but the primary programs i use with it are as well. Oh well, I stopped whining long enough to buy the new iLife suite. And, as is Apple’s way, it’s a great upgrade to a great suite.
iPhoto 6 – Increases library capacity from 25,000 to 250,000 photos. Runs amazingly fast even with all of those images. And, with a .Mac account, allows you to photocast to anyone who subscribes to your images.
GarageBand 3 – Not only does it run faster and smoother. Not only can a novice create their own music. Now, you can even use it as a studio to create your own podcast, complete with images and music.
iMovie HD 6 – Adding the fuctionality of High-Def and Widescreen wasn’t enough for Apple. They threw in real time effects and titling. Plus, movie themes. (I’m still trying to figure out how to use those.)
iDVD 6 – While the interface is smoother and faster, the real treat here are the new themes. Just plain beautiful, and in Widescreen format no less.
iWeb – I was admittedly skeptical of this new addition to the suite. But so far, it is impressing me to no end. It is as close to a drag-and-drop web editor that you may ever see. While the templates could use more variiety to them, the integration with the other programs in the suite is amazing. You can output a movie from iMovie and it will place itself in a web page. Same with a podcast created in GarageBand. You can create your own blog and add an RSS feed at the touch of a button. While they could make it clearer, you don’t have to upload to a .Mac account. You can save the pages and upload via FTP to any web server.
Overall, the new iLife ’06 is a home run.
Review by Gary Carpineta for Apple iLife ’06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION]
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If you skipped last year’s iLife update then you should run, to the store to buy this update. This is one of the nicest updates Apple has done to iLife.
I’ll start with a general overview of some new features. A big difference is that all the apps were given a makeover. They all now look like iTunes 6 with that nice platinum look. This is a huge improvment over brushed metal in my opinion. Next is that iLife is even more tied to .Mac in this version (a service some love and others hate, I personaly think it is worth the money) giving even more value to the service.
Now let me go through each application:
iWeb – This is a new app used for simple web publishing. At first I wasn’t too impresed with this app due to its very basic features. Turns out, while limited you can due serious customizing to the templates Apple provides. This is a great app to simply put all the stuff you created using iLife on to the web. It takes about 30 minutes to put up a fully functional, great looking web page. iWeb is not tied to .Mac so if you already have web hosting you can use it to build pages, though to use one putton publishing and the new slideshow for photo pages you must be a .Mac subscriber.
iPhoto – One of my favorite iLife apps. This version is much improved over ’05. Every year Apple promises speed improvements and this year they finally delivered. You can also add 250,000 photos to your library. Full screen editing is a great feature that most people will probably use often. The effects cheesey in my opinion but some people may like them. The adjustment tools are the same as last years version (you don’t need to mess with something that works so good). Apple also promises better printing of books, so far I haven’t ordered any from 06 but last years looked pretty good though there was some room for improvement.
Garageband – I don’t use Garageband much but the new podcast studio works great, very easy to use. This is coming from a dummy when it comes to audio editing.
iDVD – Not much new here. The new themes are pretty cool and they match up with the animated themes in iMovie. The interface has been changed a bit for the better.
iMovie – I’ve been playing with iMovie a lot since getting iLife ’06 and I’m impressed. The new themes (only for Tiger users) are very cool. They really make your movies a bit more entertaining and they match the new iDVD themes. The themes feature alone makes this update worth it mainly though if you are a Tiger user.
Even if you use just two of these apps, iLife is worth the price. This year saw some very nice updates to already wonderful applications. These programs are part of the reason the Mac is so great. To top it off I haven’t found a single bug after using the programs for almost a week straight.
Nice work Apple!
Review by busterv for Apple iLife ’06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION]
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I’m starting up a business and it was my intent to learn Frontpage and build a site which I would have up in the Spring. The problem is that I knew exactly what I wanted the page to look like and operate. I had tinkered around with Frontpage a year ago just because I was curious how a web site was put together, and so I figured it would take several months to get what I wanted.
Since that time I bought a Mac and wondered about the wisdom of using Frontpage because it would mean that I would have to have a PC around to update and change the web site. But I liked the flexibility that Frontpage offered, and was willing to work at it until I could take advantage of that. Or wait until MS comes out with their updated version with Vista and see what that is like.
I emailed a friend who does web site work and asked what I should use if I was going to be using our Macs for this. He said iWeb, which made me pause because I was trying to create a business web site, not a blog or site of my pictures of my last vacation. But I like him, he’s incredibly smart and all that stuff, and so I thought I’d buy it and see if it would work. If not I’d just buy another Mac friendly program like Rapid Weaver.
At first I was put off by the number of templates, which I thought was way too few. But I would say that the hardest part of the process was accepting that my site was not going to be exactly what I had envisioned in my head. While I was getting over that I just started goofing around to see what it could do.
I was literally stunned at the ease of use. I found that if I started with blank pages I could make it do what I wanted, and how I wanted it to look. The only lack of flexibility is that the buttons to bounce between pages is always at the top. That’s not a problem for me, however.
I have never used a program which was so completely intuitive. I never had a roadblock, and the only help I needed was found in the book “The Macintosh iLife ’06″ by Jim Heid. He gives less than 20 pages to iWeb, but it’s more than enough. It was actually so enjoyable to work on my site that I ended up working on it one night until 4 in the morning — and I was in college during the Carter administration, so I’m normally hitting the sack at 10 like the boring person I am!
I had planned on having my site done by the end of the year, using Frontpage, but it’s virtually done now after 10 days of working here and there on it. (What’s left to do is to take a few more pictures and edit the text again.) My plan was also to take a month or two and learn how to load it to a site and make changes as needed, etc. That took an hour to figure out (using Transmit ftp program, and hosting at Mecca Hosting — I also have great things to say about that program and hosting site as well).
So, after about two weeks my site is up temporarily at .Mac (because I could password protect it and just have a few friends look at it and make comments), and I created a temporary site at Mecca. As an aside I didn’t want to use .Mac for my host because I needed my business name in my URL, but I’ll use their site for the sixty days and then decide. Maybe i do a personal web site at .Mac just for fun.
But know that it was very, very easy to download my site to Mecca and I started out never having done an ftp transfer. It did take about an hour figuing out Transmit, but even that was fun rather than frustrating.
As for the site, no one has any idea I created it on iWeb, meaning that it doens’t look amateurish. In fact I think it looks better than many of the sites friends in my line of work have had professionally done. Perhaps that’s because it’s more to my taste, but my point is that it was easy to make what I wanted and have it come out looking great.
My only complaints are the lack of templates, which I was able to get around by starting with blank pages. So that’s no complaint at all.
My second complaint is that this was supposed to take a few months of my time (working at it when I found the time and was willing to work through frustrations – which never materialized). Now’s it’s done and I can’t put it on the web until the Spring. That’s my real complaint.
This is without a doubt the best program I have ever used.
Review by Walter for Apple iLife ’06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION]
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I purchased my Mac in Sept 2005 – having been a PC user for more than ten years. My main reason for buying a Mac was for my hobbies in photography and videography. I was using Roxio’s Easy Media Creator video software for creating DVDs for my home videos and I wanted to move on to the next step. At first – I considered trying Adobe Premier Elements – but that was too complicated. I did a lot of research online and the one thing that struck me was that a lot of reviews were recommending Mac software.
Although I had iLife ’05 – I still decided to buy iLife ’06. The compelling reason was really due to the new features with iPhoto, including:
1. Ability to support more pictures in the library – up to 250,000 pictures
2. Ability to support linking of files to the library – instead of copying the files and taking up more space.
I had recently purchases a high-end digital SLR and for those of you with a digital camera know – you’ll definitely have way more pictures owning a digital camera than a film camera. Whenever I take pictures – I can easily take 500 pictures at a time, and if I do that twice or three times a month, that’s close to 2,000 pictures. Within a year – I would have maxed out the capabilities of iPhoto ’05.
The other cool thing is that iPhoto ’06 doesn’t have to copy the files from my source to it’s own iLife directory. So now – I maintain my own directory structure and when I ‘import’ to iLife ’06 – it creates a reference – thereby saving me hard-drive space that can be used to store even more pictures! The additional benefit is that whenever I make changes to a picture file – iPhoto actually makes a copy and operates off of that copy – thereby perserving the integrity of the original. So if I want to ‘revert to original’ it’s just a mouse click away.
Review by D. Chaffin for Apple iLife ’06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION]
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All of the favorites are there with great improvement in speed and use.
I love the fact that I can open up more than one project in iMovie and move scenes from one project to another.
GarageBand has improved tremendously as well.
iPhoto is about the same although the speed has increased tremendously. And iDvd still needs more templates.
The only part of the package that fell short is iWeb. Too few templates with too few options. It is easy to put together a very quick page (I put together a slide show page of our kids pics for Grandma) but that’s about all it’s good for.
I’m sure that, if given time, iWeb will mature as iMovie and the rest have. They should have done what they did with iMovie at the beginning. Make iWeb a free download, fix it, build on it, then make it an app that you just got to have.
If you are getting iLife because of iMovie or GarageBand then, I say, go for it.
If you want iLife because you want an easy web design program, go with RapidWeaver until at least iWeb 2.0