Apple released iLife ’04 on the 16th. I’ve been playing with it for the last few days……

And so far, I’m impressed with the improvements made to all of the iApps (iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD…iTunes wasn’t updated with the rest of them, staying at its existing version 4.2).

iPhoto –

The major update is the ability to work with libraries of photos that are in excess of 25,000 pictures without huge wait times. Granted, I only have about 1500 pictures in my library at the moment.. so I still have a ways to go before I hit that size library, but even working with my smaller library has shown speed improvements.

Slideshow improvements – You can now use more then 1 song at a time in your slideshow, and there are a bunch of new transitions to use as you go from one picture to the next.

“Smart Albums” – a feature taken from iTunes’ smart playlists, you set criteria, and the albums automatically update with whatever pictures match your criteria.

Lots of other little improvements, and under the hood stuff to.

iMovie –

Faster! much faster. New titles (Including the crawling text made famous by the Star Wars movies).

New transitions

The ability to edit your clip on the timeline – And undo anything you might screw up. iMovie is still a Non-destructive editor, which is nice

iDVD –

The big one here is that the maximum movie size has been extended to 2 hours on a single DVD-R, due to enhanced compression. I haven’t had a chance to play with iDVD yet, so I don’t know if this effects encoding time, although I’d imagine that it does.

New themes, there are a bunch of new themes, and you can add a theme to each different menu page.

GarageBand –

Brand new application, allows anyone to create music, it functions as a full recording/mixing studio. Since I can’t carry a tune.. I don’t think I’ll be doing much with this, but it is fun to play with!

Lifli software has released a new version of iBlog. You can download it here Most of the features in the new version don’t apply to me, since I use the .Mac version of iBlog, and can only create a blog on my .Mac disk space. But one feature that does apply to all iBlog users, is a Auto Abstract feature (which I’m trying on this entry). The Auto Abstract is supposed to create the abstract version of each entry (the part you see on the main page, that has the short information with the “Read More” link.

The AA feature has got a little slider bar, where you control how much of your body entry is used to make up the abstract, anywhere from 1-100%, as well as a check box to enable/disable it. One bug I’ve noticed as I’m creating this entry, is that if part of the body that the AA feature chooses has got a hyperlink in it (in this case, the link to download the updated iBlog) the AA doesn’t keep the link information, just the text. I’ll have to remember to submit that one as a bug.

One feature I’d like to see added to iBlog is some indication to the reader, whether or not there is anything else on the ‘read more’ page. I’ve seen other Blogging software that has information in parentheses after the “read more” link that tells you how many more words, and/or pictures are in the “body” of the entry. I’ve requested the feature from Lifli Software, so who knows, perhaps it will end up getting added at some point in the future.