Apple Thoughts: iLife '09 Announced at Macworld

"At the Macworld Expo on Tuesday, Apple introduced iLife '09, which features major upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand, and includes iDVD and an updated version of iWeb."

This was an expected update, but even so, it offers some cool new features for each part of the iLife '09 package.

iPhoto now offers facial recognition and geo-tagging, or as Phil Schiller called it, "Faces and Places." Faces allows you to assign a name to a "face" and iPhoto will scan and assign (after confirmation) the name to other photos in your library. Places will automatically import location data from any GPS-enabled iPhone or camera (you can also manually assign "places" to any photo). Enhanced slideshows and travel book options are also part of the new package.

iMovie '08 not popular with many and they hope to have improved on this with iMovie '09. Many new features featuring drag and drop advanced editing capabilities, new Precision Editor and video analysis to reduce shaking video when you had too much coffee prior to filming. Appears they have restored timeline editing as well, one of my pet peeves with iMovie '08.

GarageBand part of the mix as well and the coolest update in my opinion is that it gives you fundamental lessons on how to play the guitar or piano, in HD no less! And to top it off there are artist lessons for some of the songs with the actual artists like John Mayer giving the lessons!

iWeb and iDVD also updated with some features like youtube integration, RSS feeds and FTP publishing.

iLife '09 will be available later this month as $79 upgrade and the family pack will cost $99. The full package will sip on all new macs.

All in all, some much needed upgrades to this amazing suite of products, is it enough for you to upgrade? I know it is for me!