Tuesday, August 07, 2007

What's New

When I dropped by the Apple homepage today I almost had a heart attack.

 I knew the new iMac was slated to come out this week but I didn't expect to see the new iLife. I've been waiting for that for about a year. Last fall I went in to buy the latest iLife and the guy in the Apple Store says, "You should wait, the new one's coming out any day now." First of all, you have to love that the people at the Apple store say stuff like that. However, the guy was a little off.

Anyway, I'm dying to get the new iPhoto. It seems like each version gets better at handling larger libraries. I've passed the 14,000 photos mark and I gotta tell you, it's dragging a little in performance. I hope the new version helps. The "Events" feature seems like great idea too when you have that many photos. I've kinda been using albums to do the same thing.

I also look forward to dabbling with the new podcasting tools in Garageband. Could you imagine if I had a podcast that I could also not update regularly?

When my in-laws finally bought an iMac last year, I was very impressed with how easy it was to publish a web-page from iWeb. iWeb came on their new iMac and was the reason for my trip to the Apple store that I told you about earlier. All these thikngs have had me chomping at the bit for the new iLife. AND NOW IT'S HERE!

As if that were not enough, I then noticed that the new iWork is out too. I've also been waiting for that. I've needed to get a copy (of Keynote) for another member of the media team at my church and I decided I'd wait for the new iLife and buy a Family License. Great! Wait a minute; the fabled spreadsheet app is included! What?! No way!!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?!!! Excel is the one app that still gets some play out of my entire ancient version of MS Office. I don't do anything fancy, just your basic spreadsheets with simple computations. Goodbye Office, Hello iWork.

Also new this week is a welcomed bump up in my .Mac iDisk storage. I got an email tonight that said, ."Mac gives you new ways to share, more online storage, larger email attachments, and better control over spam in webmail." I went from 1GB of storage to 10 GB just like that. It was a little late, but better late than never. I was running into the problem of a full inbox because I save everything. But now my .Mac is pack-rat friendly.

All-in-all, it was a great day for Apple news. Now if I can just hang in there until Leopard gets here.

3 comments:

White ball said...

I think New iMac keyboard is Ultra-thin.

Geekbert said...

It looks like the same feel as the new MacBook keyboards. I'm really fond of the Powerbook keyboard I've grown so accustomed to. The flatness of the new key designs doesn't appeal to me. However, I've decided not to judge it until I use it for a while. Since I'm not due for a new Mac for a few years, I guess I give my favorite design team in the world the benefit of the doubt.

I'd be interested to hear feedback from any of you out there who have one of the new keyboards, especially if you used to have one of the old Apple keyboards.

petros said...

Geekbert, I just left the Apple store @ Twelve Oaks and I agreed with you on the keyboard until I typed on it for a little. It's much better than it looks. I really like the keyboard on my MacBook Pro, and I am starting to like the bluetooth keyboard I use at work when I dock. I think what I liked about the new keyboard, as opposed to my bluetooth one, is that you don't have to push keys down so far. I could we myself typing much faster on the new one becuase each keystroke requires less attention (you don't have to press down as hard and the key doesn't go as deep).

I did purchase the new Bluetooth piece that Apple fabricated. I can't wait to get home and charge it up! Maybe you could swing by the office sometime and look it over; then you could do a critique on Geekbert!