MacWorld '09: I'm Impressed

So there were rumors that the reason Steve Jobs wasn't doing the keynote was that they didn't have anything cool and new to introduce. It might have been true, but that's not what I think. Everything new that they introduced today was just an update on a current product, but I'm very impressed with it all.

First of all, iLife '09. I think that this is the most solid release of iLife ever. The main thing that really popped for me was the all new iMovie '09. It's exactly what was missing from iMovie '08 which received tons of critisism for it's lack of features. I think that the new iMovie is the perfect balance between iMovie '08s ease of use and iMovie HD's powerful tools. The new mapping, effects, and themes just really blew me away with their simplicity and beauty. I really can't wait until it's available because this will really save me some time with my editing projects.

iPhoto looks quite nice with the new Faces and Places features. I'm a bit skeptical of the face detection and face recognition thing, but who knows how well it will work yet? I think it could get annoying if it's not very accurate and in situations when you're working with hundreds of photos of people and some may happen to look alike. I think that the geotagging feature is just awesome and the google map to tell you exactly where your photo was taken is quite awesome.

I really like what they've done with GarageBand with the "Learn to Play" feature. I think this is great for people with Macs that are wanting to learn a new instrument but don't want to go get 3rd party software to learn. I'm undecided on my feelings toward the new effects modules for guitar recording. The new "stomp box" setup looks nice, but I'm not sure if I prefer it to the traditional sliders and effects drop downs.

The second announcement of the day was iWork '09. iWork '09 felt like a minor update to me. I personally complain all the time about the non-full-screen Pages layout that was in iWork '08, and now my problems with that are long gone, at least when I upgrade that is. I'm not feeling too compelled to upgrade except for this iWork.com feature that they've added. There's been all this talk about "cloud computing" and Apple is taking their first step into this exciting new revolution. iWork.com is basically a web version of iWork that makes it easy to share documents between several people, or between multiple computers by the same user.

The third and final announcement of the day was the 17" Precision Unibody MacBook Pro. It doesn't have a removeable battery like the previous MacBook Pro did, which could be a problem for some people, but I think the new 8 hour battery life will make up for that. Another nice thing for the pro consumers is the option of a non-reflective screen for those who don't like the glossy finish.

All-in-all, I'm impressed with what Phil Schiller rolled out today at MacWorld. I think that it was a great follow up to ten year of Steve Jobs' keynotes and a great ending to Apple's years of presenting at MacWorld.

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