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...the new iLife and iWork packages Apple introduced yesterday.
iLife (for the non-Mac people out there) consists of iTunes (for playing music), Garageband (for making your own music), iPhoto (for digital still photography), iMovie (for digital video editing), iDVD (for creating DVDs of your photos and movies), and iWeb (a template-driven website generation program) -- the iLife suite comes free on all new Macs. I put together my web site with the previous version of iWeb -- mostly to see if it would work at all (and because I was tired of the old site, which had been done in Freeway Pro. Now, Freeway Pro is a fine program (and much more sophisticated than iWeb), and I may yet return to it. And the previous version of iWeb had a terrific deficiency -- there was no way to add HTML code to the site. That had to be cured by use of a third party 'fix' in the form of a shareware program called iWeb Enhancer, for which I gladly paid the shareware fee. My own hope for the new version of iWeb was that it could handle small bits of HTML coding, and it appears that they've put that into this version, along with a few other enhancements.
They've also enhanced iPhoto, which was already a fantastic organizational tool and a (very) basic editing tool for digital photos -- again, not anywhere close to a replacement for Photoshop Elements or Photoshop itself, but an excellent tool for those of us who don't make our livings dealing with photos. And they also put some lovely new features in Garageband, which is a very dangerous application for me as a musician, because I could easily lose days at a time playing with this...
Gotta upgrade!
And then there's iWork. In the past, iWork was two software programs: Pages (a beautifully simple page-layout program), and Keynote. Keynote is a presentation package that, frankly, blows Powerpoint entirely out of the water. (Speaking of which, yes, Keynote could open .ppt files, and could also export in that format, though you'd lose any of the transitions and effects (of which there are many) that Powerpoint simply isn't capable of producing). I use Keynote all the time in my writing classes, and it's frankly the best presentation software I've ever seen. There's a new Keynote... and it looks even better. Anyone using Powerpoint is using the second-best software available for the job. I'm already drooling for it...
Pages was already an excellent tool for creating newletters, flyers, etc., with professional results and a fantastically intuitive interface. It could also open .doc files, and also save in that format. But... it was merely an "OK" word processor, and bogged down when I tried to open novel-length manuscripts in it. My word processor of choice is NIsus Writer Pro -- a fantastic word processor all around, and one I highly recommend. However, Pages has been revamped, and supposedly boasts new word-processing capabilities along with enhancements to the page-layout stuff. I'll certainly give it another try as a word-processor. I have my doubts that it's going to knock Nisus Writer Pro from its current place atop the heap of word processing programs, but I'll give it a try.
If you've been paying attention, you'll have noted that iWork is a direct (and unsubtle) competitor to two of the three main components of Microsoft Office: Word and Powerpoint. You'll also have noted that there was no spreadsheet in the old version...
Now there is. In the new iWork package, there is a program called "Numbers" -- which is exactly what you think it is: Apple's version of Excel. Yes, it will read from and write to .xls format. Yes, it has the intuitive Apple interface -- if you know any of the Apple programs, you already know a lot about Numbers. And yes, it seems to do some things that Excel simply can't do. If I can import my current spreadsheets into Numbers and lose no functionality, well, I'm done with MS Office forever, as the only program I ever use anymore is Excel.
Definitely time to upgrade. And Apple prices very nicely, too: the iLife and iWork packages are $79 each. Compare the price of iWork to the price of MS Office...
And hey, those new iMacs look pretty nice too. Megen, who is working at the Apple Store up in Columbus, called us yesterday to say "I've never said this before about a computer, but the new iMac is sexy!" Unfortunately, finances preclude an upgrade there any time soon...
iLife (for the non-Mac people out there) consists of iTunes (for playing music), Garageband (for making your own music), iPhoto (for digital still photography), iMovie (for digital video editing), iDVD (for creating DVDs of your photos and movies), and iWeb (a template-driven website generation program) -- the iLife suite comes free on all new Macs. I put together my web site with the previous version of iWeb -- mostly to see if it would work at all (and because I was tired of the old site, which had been done in Freeway Pro. Now, Freeway Pro is a fine program (and much more sophisticated than iWeb), and I may yet return to it. And the previous version of iWeb had a terrific deficiency -- there was no way to add HTML code to the site. That had to be cured by use of a third party 'fix' in the form of a shareware program called iWeb Enhancer, for which I gladly paid the shareware fee. My own hope for the new version of iWeb was that it could handle small bits of HTML coding, and it appears that they've put that into this version, along with a few other enhancements.
They've also enhanced iPhoto, which was already a fantastic organizational tool and a (very) basic editing tool for digital photos -- again, not anywhere close to a replacement for Photoshop Elements or Photoshop itself, but an excellent tool for those of us who don't make our livings dealing with photos. And they also put some lovely new features in Garageband, which is a very dangerous application for me as a musician, because I could easily lose days at a time playing with this...
Gotta upgrade!
And then there's iWork. In the past, iWork was two software programs: Pages (a beautifully simple page-layout program), and Keynote. Keynote is a presentation package that, frankly, blows Powerpoint entirely out of the water. (Speaking of which, yes, Keynote could open .ppt files, and could also export in that format, though you'd lose any of the transitions and effects (of which there are many) that Powerpoint simply isn't capable of producing). I use Keynote all the time in my writing classes, and it's frankly the best presentation software I've ever seen. There's a new Keynote... and it looks even better. Anyone using Powerpoint is using the second-best software available for the job. I'm already drooling for it...
Pages was already an excellent tool for creating newletters, flyers, etc., with professional results and a fantastically intuitive interface. It could also open .doc files, and also save in that format. But... it was merely an "OK" word processor, and bogged down when I tried to open novel-length manuscripts in it. My word processor of choice is NIsus Writer Pro -- a fantastic word processor all around, and one I highly recommend. However, Pages has been revamped, and supposedly boasts new word-processing capabilities along with enhancements to the page-layout stuff. I'll certainly give it another try as a word-processor. I have my doubts that it's going to knock Nisus Writer Pro from its current place atop the heap of word processing programs, but I'll give it a try.
If you've been paying attention, you'll have noted that iWork is a direct (and unsubtle) competitor to two of the three main components of Microsoft Office: Word and Powerpoint. You'll also have noted that there was no spreadsheet in the old version...
Now there is. In the new iWork package, there is a program called "Numbers" -- which is exactly what you think it is: Apple's version of Excel. Yes, it will read from and write to .xls format. Yes, it has the intuitive Apple interface -- if you know any of the Apple programs, you already know a lot about Numbers. And yes, it seems to do some things that Excel simply can't do. If I can import my current spreadsheets into Numbers and lose no functionality, well, I'm done with MS Office forever, as the only program I ever use anymore is Excel.
Definitely time to upgrade. And Apple prices very nicely, too: the iLife and iWork packages are $79 each. Compare the price of iWork to the price of MS Office...
And hey, those new iMacs look pretty nice too. Megen, who is working at the Apple Store up in Columbus, called us yesterday to say "I've never said this before about a computer, but the new iMac is sexy!" Unfortunately, finances preclude an upgrade there any time soon...