Apple had an event yesterday. And i saw that it was goooood. Seriously now, i was pleasantly surprised by - well - the surprises that were shown by Steve and co. Here's a brief sum of coolness:
iLife 11 This update to the iLife family of products is one of the best ever, in my opinion.
iPhoto got yet more social features into it, like the ability to display your Facebook photo albums, as well as comments from your friends on those photos, and the fact that you can zoom to a particular part of the world map and, with one click, see the pictures inside that area. Other interesting features include a full screen mode, that takes away everything that is peripherical when organizing your pictures. They also introduced new slideshow templates and the books feature is very, very enhanced, showing a bookcase with all the photo book projects you have created and giving you complete control on the generation of the book.
iMovie also was added a lot of nice new features. The most notable include the long waited ability to edit audio directly in the timeline, like adjusting the sound level (even for just parts of a clip) and do fade ins and fade outs. Another great feature is the trailers part. It can now help you take your favorite footage and create movie-trailer-like movies, effortlessly. I can see myself using almost all these features in my podcast :D
GarageBand got some love as well: Between the ability to match the groove, or beat, of a track to another one, hence turning out-of-sync tracks into fully synced ones (which looks like magic), and a feature that reminds me of Guitar Hero called "How did i play", GarageBand gets an incredible boost in terms of helpful features for artists and aspiring musicians.
No word on the rest of the products, but i can imagine some updates as well, though probably minor. FaceTime for Mac Yep, it's here and fully available. You can now make video calls between iPhones and Macs (or macs and macs as well). Pretty awesome, though i wonder what will happen to iChat, and why wasn't that integrated… Mac AppStore Will be available in 90 days time (yes, also for Snow Leopard) and will rock. These guys are going to make a ton of money on this thing. And for the end user, well, it means no longer manually installing updates for your favorite apps or using the (somehow) disparate software update mechanism in OSX. MacBook Air In one word: "Freakinawesome" :) No more spinning drives (yes, that means no optical drive as well: goodbye DVDs), which pretty much makes them lighter and smaller. 2 versions are available, one 13 inch and one 11 inch. The prices go from $999 to $1599, depending on the version and options you want. OSX 10.7 Lion They showed off some new features, though the most notable ones are:
A new dashboard: Where you can see all your installed apps from the Mac AppStore, like you do one your iPhone (yes, sliding panels and everything), and group them as well; Full screen apps. Meaning, real fullscreen goodness for your applications. They basically want to make Lion a bridge between traditional OSX and the iOS, where every app is basically fullscreen; Something called mission control, where you can see an overview of every app that is running on your Mac, be it fullscreen or windowed. Think Exposé, but better arranged.
What about you? What are your thoughts on Apple's new features?
