Today Steve Jobs hosted an Apple keynote presentation appropriately titled Back to the Mac. In it he demonstrated the new version of iLife ’11, highlighting major upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand; introduced FaceTime for the Mac; previewed the next version of Mac OS X; and unveiled two new MacBook Air notebooks. It’s breakdown time.
iLife ’11: The latest version of iLife packs the usual suspects–iPhone, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD. The former three have been given major upgrades in functionality.
iPhoto ’11 features a new full-screen mode. With a click of a button (the green [+] located at the top left corner of the window), desktop applications, the menu bar, and other distractions disappear. In full-screen mode you take advantage of more screen real estate when viewing pictures in Events, Faces, Places, Albums, and Projects. Projects is a new way to view your collection of books and letterpress cards on a wooden bookshelf. The ability to create custom letterpress cards is a new feature; 15 distinct themes are at your disposal to customize and order directly from Apple to send to relatives and friends. When you go to create a book or letterpress card, a new dynamic theme browser in carousel style will be presented to you. There are also a bunch of new slideshow themes including Holiday Mobile, Reflections, and Places. Want to email a group of photos to a friend? Now you can create and send an email message within iPhoto; no need to jump out and into a mail client. You can choose from eight themes to customize how you want your pictures to be presented in the email. And lastly there’s Facebook enhancements. Within iPhoto you can now publish photos directly to your wall or to an existing album, and if your friends leave comments on your photos you’ll be able to view them in iPhoto. You can also tag faces and browse all of your Facebook albums in iPhoto; no need to jump out and into a browser.
iMovie ’11 features new audio editing tools. Detailed wave forms are color coded, so now you can see where audio levels are too loud or quiet and adjust them properly. Also there’s a new single-row view that shows you your entire movie project in one horizontal row, making it easier to edit your soundtrack. One-step effects are also at your disposal. Adding visual effects like instant replay, flash and hold, and jump cuts at beats can be done with minimal amount of clicks. The new People Finder feature works similarly to Faces in iPhoto; the software will analyze your video to identify the parts with people in them. It also finds the close-ups, medium shots, or wide angles making it easier to find these specific shots during an edit session. There are two new themes: sports and news. And now you can publish your movies directly Vimeo,CNN iReport, and Apple Podcast Producer in addition to iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, and your mobile devices. Last there’s movie trailers. You can choose from 15 templates to create professional-looking movie trailers out of your clips. Apple commissioned the London Symphony Orchestra to record (in Abbey Road Studios) and perform original tracks for you to use when creating movie trailers. Outline and storyboard views make it simple to put together a movie trailer in no time.
GarageBand ’11 includes two new features called Flex Time and Groove Matching. Flex Time allows you to fix timing mistakes on the fly; you can literally click and drag any part of a waveform to change the timing of a note or beat. Groove Matching is described as “an automatic spell checker for bad rhythm.” If one (or multiple) instruments appears to be out of rhythm, all you have to do is select the one instrument that has the perfect rhythm (called the Groove Track) and all the other instrument tracks will instantly match it. A new feature called “How Did I Play?” gives you the opportunity to play along with a piano or guitar lesson, record yourself, and test how you’re doing in real time. Like Guitar Hero, the GarageBand lesson will keep track of your performance with a performance meter and show you missed notes in red to help you perfect your skills. A track progess bar will show you how better (or worse) you’re performing a particular song by date. Finally, there’s new lessons for piano and guitar, as well as new guitar amps and stompbox effects.
iLife ’11 is available for purchase today at $49. A family pack, which includes 5 licenses, goes for $79. Keep in mind iLife ships free with every new Mac.
FaceTime for Mac: FaceTime, the video chat app available on iPhone 4 and the latest iPod touches, is now available for the Mac in beta form. You can now initiate calls between iPhone 4s and the Mac and iPod touches and the Mac (only over WiFi for the mobile iOS devices, of course) and Mac to Mac. All you need is an Apple ID and email address to set things up. Once you’re signed in on the Mac, you can access your contacts list within Address Book to call up an iPhone 4 (click a mobile phone number) or iPod touch user (click an email address). If a mobile user rotates their camera from portrait to landscape (or vice versa), FaceTime for Mac automatically adjust the view; no need to tilt your monitor! You can also run it in full screen. Even if FaceTime isn’t running on your desktop a call will alert you when there’s an incoming call. You can disable this neat feature in Preferences if you like. Take note: FaceTime for Mac is its own app; it is not integrated in iChat AV. Download the free beta right here and test it out.
Mac OS X Lion: It’s official–the next software upgrade to OS X is called Lion (10.7), and it’s going to bring a slew of new features to Mac users. Lion is inspired by many of iPad’s software innovations. Jobs calls it “Mac OS X meets the iPad.” Here’s Apple’s philosophy behind the new OS. “We took our best thinking from Mac OS X and brought it to the iPhone. Then we took our best thinking from the iPhone and brought it to iPad. And now we’re bringing it all back to the Mac with our eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system.” Back to the Mac–get it?? Features like multitouch gestures, the App Store, app home screens, and full-screen apps are being ported from iOS to OS X in Lion.
When discussing deeper multitouch integration in Lion, Jobs was quick to point out his disagreement of vertical touch surfaces. “We’ve done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch serfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue. And after an extended period of time your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal.” So you can kiss goodbye any notion of Apple making a vertically-inclined touch interface for Mac desktops and laptops. Jobs believes trackpads are the best way to get multitouch into a laptop (and desktop using the multitouch-enabled Magic Mouse and/or Magic Trackpad). Expect to be doing a lot of scrolling, pinching, rotating, swiping, dragging, and flicking in Lion.
The Mac is getting its very own App Store in Lion. The Mac App Store works almost identically as the standard App Store for iOS devices. One-click downloads, free and paid apps (same 70/30 revenue split for developers and Apple), automatic installation (a purchased app finds a home in your dock), automatic app updates, and apps are licensed for use on all personal Macs. Browse apps by Featured, Top Charts, and Categories. The Mac App Store will be its own separate app (not available in iTunes alongside the iOS App Store) and it’s coming to Snow Leopard (v10.6) users within 90 days from today. Apple will be accepting app submissions from developers in November.
App home screens are coming to Lion, too, in a new dock extension called Launchpad. When you click the Launchpad all your Mac apps will pop up and out and display themselves in grid form just like iOS apps do on the iPad. You can flick through “pages” of apps and drag and drop apps to rearrange them and create folders. Also Lion supports system-wide support for full-screen apps. Note that every app on the iPad is a full-screen app. Features like auto save and apps resume when launched are supported for Mac apps, too.
Lastly there’s Mission Control. This new Lion feature unifies Exposé, Dashboard, full screen apps, and Spaces into one view of every app and window running on your Mac. It incorporates the next generation of Exposé, presenting all the windows running on your Mac grouped by application, alongside thumbnails of full screen apps, Dashboard, and other Spaces.
Mac OS X Lion rolls out Summer 2011.
MacBook Air: The next generation of MacBook Air thin-and-light laptops has arrived. It will come in two flavors: 11.6 inches and 13.3 inches. Let’s run through the specs. It measures 0.11-inches at its thinnest point and 0.68-inches at its thickest and weighs 2.3 pounds (11.6”) / 2.9 pounds (13.3”). It’s build out of the same precision aluminum unibody enclosure found in MacBook Pros. The 11 incher has a 1366 x768 LED backlit display; the 13 incher has a 1440×900 LED backlit display. Both pack 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 Mini DisplayPort, MagSafe power port, headphone jack, microphone, stereo speakers, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, full-size keyboard (no backlighting), multitouch glass trackpad, and a “FaceTime” camera. The 13 incher packs an SD card reader. They are powered by Intel Core 2 Duo processors, NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics, and come standard with 2GB of RAM. No optical and hard drives here. The Air family uses flash-based storage ranging from 64GB ro 256GB. The benefits of flash? Instant-on, up to 2x faster than HDDs, more reliable especially in a mobile environment, completely silent operation, and it’s 90% smaller and lighter than HDDs. The storage chips are placed directly on the logic board to allow more room for battery space. The 11 incher gets 5 hours battery life for wireless web use and the 13 incher gets 7 hours; both get up to 30 days of standby time.
Pricing starts at $999 and goes up to $1599. The 11 inch MacBook Air can be customized with a 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The 64GB flash storage model goes for $999; the 128GB model goes for $1,199. The 13 inch MacBook Air can be customized with a 1.86 GHz or 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The 128GB model costs $1,299; the 256GB model costs $1,599. Upgrading to the faster processors is an extra $100 and adding 2 extra gigs of RAM (for a total of 4GB of RAM) is also an extra $100.
The MacBook Air–the “future of notebooks”–is available for purchase today. It ships with a Software Reinstall USB drive just in case there’s a time when things need a-fixin..since there’s no optical drive for CDs.
And that about does it. No Verizon iPhone talk here–today was all about back to the Mac. Software ruled the day with new versions of iLife and Mac OS X plus FaceTime for Mac integration. New hardware in the MacBook air was icing on the cake. Very thin, sophisticated icing. Peer in the gallery for a closer look at the most beautiful laptop in the room. Look after the break for the MBA advertisement and a video that explains the development of the sleek machine.
[Via Apple]
