Apple iLife 08 OLD VERSION

iPhoto ‘08: Organize your digital photos and share them by email or through your webpage. Have fun making cards and calendars so you can get the most out of your photo library.
iMovie ‘08: Publish your movies to your website, YouTube, your iPod, iPhone and even Apple TV. The built-in library of the iMovie ‘08 automatically organizes your videos so you can view and work as intuitive as enjoying your photos. The revolutionary interface makes sharing easy with just a few clicks away.
iLife ‘08 has significantly upgraded Apple’s award-winning suite of digital lifestyle applications. A new verion of iPhoto and a completely reinvented iMovie makes enjoying your photos, creating movies, making music and websites even easier. New to iLife is the .Mac Web Gallery. Both iPhoto and iMovie is integrated into .Mac Mac Gallery for instantly creating and hosting online photo and video contents. .Mac Web Gallery: Through iPhoto ‘08, you can share photos with friends and family on your .Mac Web Gallery where visitors can enjoy high-quality images or even contribute their own with either a Mac or a PC.
GarageBand ‘08: GarageBand is the perfect place to get your act together. Create your very own virtual onstage band and play along on your favorite instrument whether you’re a first-time musician or a seasoned pro. Record, edit, and mix a song exactly as you want it, in pristine CD quality.
iWeb ‘08: Use Apple-designed themes and customize them with your text, photos, movies and even podcasts and create a website using iWeb that defines who you are. You can switch themes at anytime with a simple click.
iDVD ‘08: Quickly and easily create Hollywood-style DVDs with iDVD. Use the Apple-designed animation themes to go from main screen to chapter selection. Ten new themes and snappier performance make iDVD more fun than ever.

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars iLife ‘08
I really love the GarageBand software!!! It is amazing!!! The only downside is that the iPhoto doesn’t run that great on a 1.5Ghz Powerbook and the iMovie software for some reason is not compatible. Other than that is good!

3 Stars iMovie 08 Was a Bummer - Everything Else Was Great
As long as you don’t buy this for iMovie 08, then this is a great product. iMovie 08 is a HORRIBLE replacement for the incredibly easy to use and powerful older iMovie. iMovie 08 may have a place in this world under a different name and as a differently focused product, but it is NOT a good movie editor.

4 Stars Good, but better to wait for iLife ‘09
Hold your money until the new version of iLife comes out and purchase that. I bought version ‘08 thinking it might be a year before the next version is on the market and now,a couple months later, I must spend more money to have the newest iLife that is due to be released soon.

5 Stars iLife is great
I am a mac lover and was a bit reticent about changing over to iLife. Once I quickly downloaded the program my fears subsided and i was thrilled with all of the changes. I wasn’t too sure how they could have improved on the product - but they did. Kudos to Apple. Another great addition to the line.

3 Stars Release Cycles and System Requirement fine print
While I did manage to get the better picture slide show encoding option I was looking for with the newer version of iDVD, it wish I had read the system requirements more closely to have known that the 08 iMovie would not install on my G4 Mac prior to purchasing this software package. That is my fault. I was a bit annoyed, but not too surprised, that Apple released iLife 09 1 month later. Since I’m still running 10.4 even the new iPhoto with face recognition would not run on my system without upgrading to 10.5, so I’ll continue to appreciate the iLife 08 sw packages which do run on my setup and make sure I read the fine print before purchasing in the future.

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MobileMe Retail

MobileMe is the Internet service from Apple that keeps your email, contacts, and calendar up to date across your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. You also get an elegant Gallery for sharing your photos with friends and family, iDisk for storing and sharing important documents online, and you can access and manage it all with a suite of desktop-quality web applications at www.me.com.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Mobile Me is a much needed item.
Mobile me makes life much easier for both personal and profesional uses. I could not get along without it.

1 Star A WARNING TO ALL USERS OF MOBILE ME
IT IS VERY LIKELY YOU WILL LOSE DATA - EVEN IF YOU THINK IT HAS “IMPROVED”

It is probable that you will lose, or at the very least, lose ACCESS to, some or all of your data on MobileMe. Like everyone else, I have endured the instability of MobileMe since its launch. Yes, it has gotten more stable since launch, and yes, they’ve done an okay job of fixing some of the early issues that users have been experiencing. But over the past couple of months, I have had at least one instance a month of something not syncing correctly. One time it was calendar entries. Sometimes it’s duplicate emails. Sometimes contacts. Maybe they’ll sync from iphone to MobileMe and my laptop, but not my desktop. Or vice versa. It’s been fairly annoying to have to spot-check and babysit these syncs over the months (e.g., I input a phone number into my iPhone but never am quite sure if it’s going to end up on my computer. 95% of the time it does, but every once in a while it wouldn’t.) As annoying (and, really, inexcusable on the part of Apple) as this has been, it has never been disastrous, and always easily fixed with a quick support chat with support people (or reading support documentation online) that usually resulted in doing a forced reset of one or more computers, and then everything worked smoothly.

UNTIL LAST WEEK. I noticed my contacts weren’t updating from my iphone. MobileMe had them correctly, but my desktop and laptop did not. I had been on a trip to Europe, and had input a few new contacts while I was there, edited others, etc. When I returned home, I noticed that none of them were on my local computers. I’m going to spare the boring details — but after an entire week of troubleshooting with MobileMe support personnel, escalating it to their supervisors and members of the MobileMe engineering team, etc., I received the message that I am reprinting below, which basically states that the contact data on the iPhone and MobileMe can never be synced back to my computers, and that the only way to restore this data is to manually re-enter it. They were also kind enough to include an activation key for another year of MobileMe. Which at first I thought was a joke (”you can get a whole new year of data corruption and instability!” “Lose your data for a whole new year!”) but, sadly, is their idea of compensation for lost data, lost hours, and the irresponsible launch of a service that, more than six months after it debuted, is still mangling users’ data.

NOTE TO MICROSOFT: I hated Vista, and those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads were (I’m ashamed to admit) extremely influential in getting me to switch to Apple. I’m a huge Apple fan. I love my Macbook Air so much that I practically sleep with it next to me. And my iPhone is a close second. But not once — NOT ONCE — during my time with Windows Mobile and Exchange did I ever lose a contact, experience data corruption, or experience ONE SINGLE INCIDENT where data did not syncronize. NOT ONCE. You should exploit the instability of MobileMe for all it’s worth. Have the fat schlubby PC guy out partying with his friends, while the skinny cool Mac guy is at home alone because he’s lost all the contact information on his iPhone trying to sync to MobileMe.

APPLE’S IDEA OF SUPPORT:

This is XXXX again with the MobileMe Support Staff. I have heard back from my Engineer who was working on your account and they have stated they were unable to repair the data and sync it down from MobileMe.

Unfortunately, the only way to resolve the inconsistent data error is to re-create the data manually on the computer and the reset the sync data to replace the data on MobileMe with that of the computer.

I am terribly sorry for this, I have gone ahead and issued you a MobileMe Activation Key for a 1 year free of service.

Your Activation Key is: 3Q2TCXXXXXXXXX

You may use this key to extend your current account or activate/re-activate another account.

Thank you so much for your patience and understanding. I hope you continue to use the MobileMe services in the future.

Have a lovely day!

YEAH RIGHT.

“Have a lovely day?” Seriously?

It’s like at the end “Airplane” when the plane has crashed through all the terminals and the stewardesses are telling the departing passengers “Thanks for flying TransGlobal.” (Though if it were Apple Airlines, they’d be giving a 20% off coupon for the next flight and think that they were being generous.)

BOTTOM LINE.

Looks good, sounds good, and there’s no reason in the world (that I can think of) that it shouldn’t be reliable and stable. (For godssake, MICROSOFT can do it!) But for some reason it still is. And maybe you’ll be lucky and never have problems. But in my experience, it’s a pretty big risk, and losing important data is one of the most infuriating (and potentially devasting, depending on your backup scenarios) experiences a user can face. This is a substandard service which Apple has arrogantly marketed as reliable, and it’s a joke.

3 Stars It’s OK
It’s ok. The galleries/iPhoto/Mac/iPhone integration is hard to beat for a Mac head. But don’t be stupid: if you just need an e-mail address, this is overkill. Amazon’s price now ($70) is the most I’d pay.

5 Stars Rocky start to Mobile Me - Now Sync works great
I have two apple laptops an imac and a pc at work - this service keeps my important work files synced between all of my computers effortlessly! When mobileme was first introduced there was definitely some glitches but now it seems to work great. I rate this 5 stars because it is such a simple complete solution for synching all of my important info and the initial glitches are gone.

5 Stars Situation Normal, all as expected
I order MobileMe (formerly .Mac) every year from Amazon because it is less expensive here than if I directly renew on Apple.com. I simply enter the authorization code on MobilMe and my renewal is applied on the correct date, renewing me for another year.

No problems, No hassles, just as I expected.

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Apple Aperture 2 1 1

You can access your entire iPhoto library directly within Aperture 2, to import selected events, albums, or individual photos using the iPhoto Browser. Aperture 2 includes an all-in-one inspector that consolidates the Project, Metadata, and Adjustments panes and lets you switch between them simply by typing W. Quickly locate images in the innovative All Projects view with project skimming. The new Quick Preview mode provides rapid-fire photo browsing, letting you quickly compare, rate, and make image selections. Aperture also offers enhanced performance when making processor-intensive adjustments, such as Noise Reduction and Highlight and Shadows. Leveraging the next-generation RAW image processing in Mac OS X Leopard, Aperture 2 delivers images of astounding quality, offering superb color fidelity, increased shadow detail, reduced noise, and advanced highlight recovery. Aperture provides RAW support for the leading digital cameras and camera backs. It also supports DNGs made from the RAW files of most digital cameras. With a .Mac account, you can take advantage of new support for .Mac Web Gallery to create beautiful online portfolios even allowing clients, colleagues, or friends to download JPEG or RAW originals complete with embedded metadata. Aperture also lets you sync your Aperture library to an iPhone or iPod. Or enjoy your photos on a widescreen TV in glorious high definition using Apple TV.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Great Product!
Fast and easy, load it and go, online tutorials if you need them. Just doesn’t get any better. Outstanding features and far easier than LightRoom or PhotoShop.

4 Stars powerful, but don’t get in a hurry
This is a powerful program. There are so many ways to adjust pictures and bring out all the detail of RAW shots. The ones I have edited in Aperture are definitely better than in iPhoto. Before you go hog wild and download all your photos into Aperture from iphoto, take some time to read the instructions online and think about how you want your photos organized. If you are coming over from iPhoto this isn’t a slam dunk. You will have to learn how the projects, folders and albums all work with each other. The built in keywords were annoying to me because they didn’t fit my photography or my organization scheme. Working with sets of keywords getting a little used to. Some of the features seem like they should be obvious, but are not. The LOOP feature isn’t as friendly as the old slider to magnify shots. Some of the little icons are almost impossible to see and figure out what they do. I think it will be awesome once I get used to it and learn all about it. If you like using keystroke shortcuts, you’ll have lots to play with here. I didn’t have a steep learning curve with iPhoto. It came quick and easy. It’s going to take longer with Aperture for sure.

Oh yeah, I upgraded the RAM on my 20″ late 2007 iMac to 3 GB from 1. It helped the program run faster. I recommend doing this.

3 Stars Nice Interface but Performance Issues
The program is very easy to use and very powerful. It takes a lot fewer steps to post process files than in photoshop and I can process dozens or hundreds in a sitting and very rarely have to turn to photoshop because Aperature’s own tools are powerful. The interface is elegant too. The problem is speed. I have a dual core 2.8ghz iMac which is well above the minimum spec for the program. Most of the time Aperature is very fast but sometimes it will grind to an absolute halt. It might take three minutes to load one image. The problem seems to be one that is getting worse as I add more and more pictures. When it goes down the whole system gets so unresponsive that I feel like i’m on a 1986 Mac Plus again.

5 Stars LOVE LOVE LOVE Aperture
I use a Canon XSi, and Aperture converts RAW images so easily. I use Aperture 2 on a PowerBook G4, 1.67Ghz, 2 GB RAM; it’s slow at times esp. with exports; but it works great. I can do other things in Aperture while is exports. I’ve never used Lightroom, but I have no need for it. I only have Photoshop CS2 (this computer does not run CS3 well at all); so I must convert RAW to DNG before I can use Photoshop. Aperture does that for me. Look into some plug-ins for exporting to Flickr/facebook etc, as that will speed up the process; and even for DNG conversion if you want/need to use Photoshop and Camera Raw doesn’t support your camera. But Aperture supports more than Camera Raw anyway. I love the Vault feature, and I have my Aperture Library backed up on a few drives - it’s easy and thoughtless with Aperture. I’m not a pro, just a serious hobbyist.

1 Star Slow, stalls out, not PhotoShop
After a long time using Photo Shop on my MacBook Pro, I was persuaded to buy and try Aperture 2. After a week of using this product, I have encountered numerous problems, including: It stalls out for no apparent reason when cloning; It is incredibly slow. Also, it has locked up several times to the point that I had to restart my computer to clear the problem.

Stick with Photo Shop. Aperture 2 does not measure up.

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