iLife ‘08 - Part 3: iWeb, GarageBand, and iDVD

After my rather monstrous reviews of the new iPhoto and iMovie, and a little interlude while other things were going on in the Apple-verse, I’ll finally finish my review of iLife ‘08 with much shorter reviews of the other three iLife ‘08 applications: iWeb, Garageband, and iDVD.

iWeb
iWeb is starting to mature now, and with this version has introduced some features users will welcome. Among those are web widgets, also known as HTML snippets, which let you add content from other sites, like YouTube videos. Two special widgets are included, Google Adsense and Google maps for placing those on your web pages. iWeb 2 improves display of photographs and albums, and probably most welcome of all, you can now use personal domains with .Mac hosted iWeb sites.

On the downside, although iWeb has a blog page in each of its templates, it is in fact next to useless for blogging. What makes blogging so popular is that the writer just fills in the blanks. With iWeb, you have to create each new blog page. The more uninitiated will quickly tire of having to manually adjust each page. For example, if you don’t have a photo, you have to realign the objects on your page.

One feature iWeb has, and a new one to several of Apple’s applications, is Instant Alpha. This is a remarkably easy to use tool for removing simple backgrounds—such as the sky—from photos. This is such a clever idea, and one I expect will be copied by many developers of image editing applications.

One thing I would like to see changed in iWeb—and any of Apple’s applications that display thumbnails of templates—is for those template previews to be scalable. The thumbnails are too small to be useful, requiring you to open them to truly decide if it’s the right template.

As a web site development tool, iWeb is adequate and getting better, but I suspect its target audience would be happier if it was even more automated.

GarageBand
GarageBand is a bit of a shooting star, catching everyone’s attention but then fading away. I had some pretty fierce arguments when it came out, defending it against claims it was a toy. Which led to my infamous interpretation of U2’s “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” described by Wired’s Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney as “interestingly awful.”

Over the journey, Apple has upgraded and tweaked GarageBand into a useful and fun application. But it is caught—like many low-end Apple apps—between what it is and what we’d like it to be. A musical newbie can have a lot of fun playing with loops, and a proficient muso can use it as a cheap four-track for quickly putting down ideas. But for those caught somewhere in between, especially those who want to create songs from the supplied loops, it is at times frustratingly limited. Although a large part of its market is people who don’t play an intsrument, it sadly lacks in sufficient loops to create anything complete without a lot of hard work. Too often you find a great loop, but nothing to go with it.

And now in its fourth generation, GarageBand is vulnerable to attracting the toy label again because of its new Magic GarageBand feature. It is akin to those music tracks on consumer music keyboards that you play along with but have no control over.

Yes, Magic GarageBand lets you change the instruments, but there are nine genres and only one song in each genre. Most people will become bored with it very quickly. There are only so many times you’ll want to play along with those nine tunes.

I haven’t seen any indication from Apple yet if they’ll supply more songs and genres. Although, if the Jam Pack add-ons are any indication, don’t expect them to be affordable.

GarageBand is a sensational application, but if you really want to create some decent songs with it but don’t play an instrument, you will need to fork out for the Jam Packs which are very expensive by comparison to GarageBand.

iDVD
iDVD is somewhat of a quiet achiever. In the shadow of iMovie, iPhoto, and GarageBand, it gets forgotten. It’s a nice little app that’s grown on me, as it does what it does and does it efficiently and with little effort.

It comes with a good array of templates and with this version, like each before it, a whole new set. Apple still tends to lean towards holiday and children’s themes, but iDVD 7 begins to correct that imbalance with some very impressive templates that look fresh and unique.

This version also adds a new “professional” compression mode. To the novice, compression is confusing and one area Apple should clarify in the iDVD interface.

Best performance refers to compression time, not the performance of the finished DVD, and thus has the least compression. It gives up to 60 minutes on a 4.7GB DVD.

Although you’d expect a higher quality to use less compression, “High quality” is in fact higher compression. Consequently it also takes much longer to render. It gives up to 120 minutes on a 4.7GB DVD.

The new “Professional quality” still only allows the same time as “High quality,” but uses a higher quality—and slower—compression. Consequently, it can take several hours to render an hour of video.

One small complaint about iDVD is that you can’t control what section of a music track is used on the menus. Therefore, you do need to cut your music track up on another app, such as GarageBand, to fit the menu timing. It would be nice if iDVD let you select the music section the same as it lets you select the section of video used for menus (by setting start and end points).

As I said, iDVD is the quiet achiever and a great little application.

Overall
iLife ‘08 is worth the upgrade if you want to enhance your photo management or make movies more easily. iDVD users will also probably like to get ahold of the new templates. However, for the Garagebanders, there’s probably not enough to justify the upgrade.

Together it is a fairly decent upgrade; however, it’s not compulsory.