talking about mac this year…

starting with iphoto ‘09…

this year they’ve introduced ‘faces’, which uses face detection to help with tagging. iphoto finds a face and you tell it who the person is, then it will find other photos that it thinks contains the same person. they say face detection isn’t perfect but it’s incredibly good.

another way to organize is ‘places’. it uses gps geotagging. more and more cameras including the iphone have built in gps, so it will automatically add a location to a map in iphoto. if photos aren’t geotagged, you can enter the location yourself.

they’ve also added support for facebook and flickr to iphoto ‘09. facebook users can add names to people in your photos, then that information gets transmitted back to iphoto.

imovie ‘09…

there’s context sensitive menus for clips, you can make new movies with dynamic themes: titles, transitions, effects. animated travel maps (you can create 2d and 3d maps to show where you’ve traveled), and now they have auto stabilization for shaky video. also they’ve added some new video effects, cartoon, x-ray etc…

moving onto garageband ‘09

in this new version, there’s a feature called ‘learn to play’. it’s a new interface and it teaches you how to play an instrument. there’s nice basic lessons for guitar and piano thats bundled in. what’s pretty cool is that when you want to learn a song they’ve enlisted artists to help you play…including patrick stump from fall out boy, and sting! there will be a built in ’store’ where you can download lessons.

that’s just a small preview of ilife ‘09 shipping in late january. it’ll be £69 for the upgrade, family pack will be £85 plus it ships with all new macs.

 

the new 17 inch macbook pro…

according to apple, it’s the world’s lightest and thinnest 17 inch notebook.

inside they have a new generation of c2d cpus, upto 8gb of ram, new nvidia graphics options, and the battery. they’ve designed the battery to last upto 8 hours on a charge.

pricing, it comes out at £1,949 (2.66ghz, 4gb ram, 320gb hard drive), and it starts shipping at the end of this month.

one more thing…

itunes.

they’re boasting that they’ve sold 6 billion songs and have 75 million accounts with credit cards. so what’s new in 2009?

first up, price. over the last 6 years songs have been $0.99, music companies want more flexibility. so they’re two new prices. one at $0.69 and the other is $1.29.

next, itunes plus. it’s drm free, and much higher quality. starting today, 8 million songs will be drm free.

the third new thing happening with itunes is to do with the iphone. the music store is not just on wifi, it’s now over 3g aswell, and that’s starting today.

 

that’s all from the macworld keynote ‘09, and that’s the last ever keynote too.

 

thanks for reading x