The Wall Street Journalis Katherine Boehret reviewed iLife i08
on a new iMac Wednesday and found the iPhoto and iMovie applications a
pleasure to use. [Subscription Required.]
Ms. Boehret noted that while the new iMacs are powerful, elegant
consumer PCs, the big change was the iLife i08 suite. Also,
some minor changes to the iMac took some getting used to.
“The biggest adjustments for users will be the screen and keyboard, which took me a few days to get used to. The new iMac comes with a glossy screen, which makes colors pop but also reflects more background light than a traditional matte display,”
Ms. Borhret reported.
The biggest change was in the design of iPhoto and iMovie which have been
redesigned. “I quickly picked up on how to use the new features in iPhoto and iMovie, thanks to unintimidating, self-explanatory icons. The Events feature in iPhoto might be a pain for users who are transferring numerous already-organized albums from the previous version of iPhoto into this one, as not all albums will perfectly translate into Events,” the noted colleague of Walt Mossberg wrote. However, she noted
that itis a great improvement over the old method and over Windows programs sheis tried.
The test of iMovie went just as well. Some short video snippets of
her office environment and a household move of the revieweris sister
moving into a new place were easily assembled into a movie:
“After dragging various clips to the top half of the screen, I added special features like music, sound effects and title slides to my project. These were all added the same way my clips were: by dragging and dropping to put the right thing where it needed to go. Music from iTunes can be used with videos, or Apple provides over 500 different sound effects and tunes.”
It only required 15 minutes to make the movie.
“The new programs in iLife i08 are a pleasure to use, and the new iMac is a great way to experience them,” Ms. Boehret concluded.