Apple Debuts iLife ‘09

January 6th, 2009 at 12:57 PM - News by Brad Cook

SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple Vice-President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller on Tuesday announced the release of iLife '09, the latest version of the company's suite featuring iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, iDVD, and GarageBand. It will be available at the end of this month for US$79, or $99 for a family pack of five licenses.

New features found in iPhoto '09 include face detection technology, GPS geotagging for sorting images by place and including maps in printed books, direct uploading to Facebook and Flikr, and new slideshow themes, including a shattered theme that breaks up photos and recomposes them. Slideshows can be saved directly to iTunes for syncing with an iPhone or iPod, with the ability to use face detection to place relevant people in the middle of photos.

iMovie '09 offers a precision editor, drag and drop with context-sensitive menus for added functionality, new themes, automatic image stabilization, 2D and 3D animated travel maps, an expanded timeline view, and the ability to splice out audio and video, along with the option to overlay audio on other video clips.

With GarageBand '09, users can employ the new Learn to Play feature with nine lessons covering guitar and keyboard basics. Artist lessons from Sting, John Fogerty of Clearance Clearwater Revival, Nora Jones, and others are available from Apple for $4.99 each.

Mr. Schiller's keynote did not cover what changes, if any, were made to iWeb and iDVD in iLife '09. As this article was published, a press release was not available, and Apple's iLife web site had not been updated yet. The Mac Observer will update this article with more information if it becomes available.