Playing with iLife 11

Mister C just added iLife 11 to my laptop. It included lots of new features for iPhoto which I think are pretty fun. So far I've only played around with making cards and themed postcards to send to friends.

Like so...



It took me just a few minutes to pull together those photos and arrange them on the cork-board background and send it to my friend A. She suggested I throw it out here so all (3) of my readers could see what fun I was having (also, what a moron I have for a cat.) I'm thinking pretty heavily about using this to put together our Christmas cards as well. We'll see how motivated I am.

Anyway, this is just the tip of the iceberg for what you can do with this stuff. I wish I was getting paid to say I love my Mac because it would totally be true. And that would be on a normal day. The folks over at Apple have done a superb job with this newest setup which includes iPhoto, the thing I use the most.

They've also added some really cool things to iMovie, including the ability to make a "trailer" of your movies. It's pretty awesome. We don't have very many videos, I always had the regular camera in my hands so recording was left up to Mister C. But I might be able to throw a few things together from what we do have. I'll have to work on that. I wish I had more now. Also, it should be noted that in the big podcast Apple did where they show how to make the trailers, their home video footage was of a different caliber than mine. It's pretty easy to make a rafting trip with friends or a tour of Europe look cool. A little more work is required to make the family dinner at Christmas come across as exotic and exciting. Just sayin'.

The upgrades to GarageBand don't make me smile as much. Mostly it looks like they've added the ability to edit your recordings to the point where if you're a sucky musician, you'll sound good. Which is great. Until you have to play without your pre-recorded and fixed up session. I'm way too much of a music purist to put up with that. I say practice until you're awesome, then get a recording. Don't make your crappy recording sound good, that's just lame.

Anyway, cool software that's a lot of fun to play around with.