New Apple fun

iMac’s, iLife 08, iWork 08, Airport Extreme, Mac Mini updates...

They almost updated everything in the product line. Nice.

So I picked up iLife and iWork 08’s, because I was at an Apple Store anyway because my battery on my powerbook died. (suckkin)

iLife looks nice, I like the new iWeb features. Almost all of the Icons are different, and they actually allow for “Web Widgets” now, which allows you to put actual html into the iWeb design, which is nice. iPhoto got a refresh as well, kinda looks like iTunes, really, and you can organize your pictures by ‘events’. Which are auto created based upon picture import batch, from what I can tell. Double clicking on a picture ‘zooms’ it in, kinda, App -opening - iPhone style. Very nice. The icon changed slightly for iPhoto as well I think. More refined. I haven’t messed with Garageband, (and don’t). iMovie won’t install on the powerbook. I don’t use it on here anyway.

iWork is nice as well, I especially like the Numbers program (the Mac replacement for Excel). The interface is a hella lot nicer. Pages and Keynote got a really nice refresher as well. Pages looks like an actual word processor now with the font bar (center, right, left, justification..etc.) actually in the interface, as opposed to in the ‘inspector’ bar like they should be. Keynote also got some actions on stuff like ‘actions’. The ability to move words within a slide, make them transparent and nice things like that. Alot of it is ‘have to see to understand’. But overall some very nice refinements that I have been looking for from the two suites for some time.

They didn’t have the new iMac’s out at the store when I was there yet, but I might have to go back there tomorrow and see it in person and give you a report on how it’s working. I am especially interested in how the keyboard is.

Airport extreme got Gigabit ports. nice.

Looks like the Mac mini got new processors too.

.Mac looks like it got an update as well with ‘Photo Galleries’. The iPhone also got a magic update timed to appear today apparently. See here for more details. Nice.
Maybe to eliminate my flickr account? We’ll see.

Also.. uh.. 10GB of storage? Um. That wasn’t there before! That’s alot more storage than before. The data transfer rates also went from 5Gb to 10Gb. (For the bottom accounts) Frickin sweet.

AHH!! I just noticed that .Mac will accept registrations from private domain names too. So you can point your CNAME ‘www’ at web.mac.com and then when people go to your web address it automagically goes to web.mac.com. Nice. Redirection.

Okay, so I just ran over and created a Web Gallery named ‘Moving’.