I'm personally a big mac-fan, I love my macbook, serves me very well. I recently used iMovie 6 HD to make my stop motion film and it was quite easy and seamless.
Now I have to say that the iMovie '08 is not a piece of software I have ever liked, unfortunately they didn't change many of the things that make iMovie '08 an extremely difficult program to use, in my opinion. I have used Adobe Premiere (almost all versions of AP) and I have used Final Cut Pro. I could do a lot on both and I found it easier to use those than the iLife '08 movie editing program known as iMovie '08. I have read that they added some really great features that actually might make it worthwhile to sit down and watch a tutorial on how the timeline is set up and such.
iWeb '09, I'm not too sure I care about that either, I mean I haven't used iWeb to its full potential so please, don't burn me for saying this. I think if you're really going to make a web site or start a blog, whatever it is you want to do on the web, iWeb is really cool to try because of the effects, but there are much more powerful programs and easier methods. I'm not against iWeb though, I liked it.
Garageband '09, YES! Good job Apple, I love garageband, and the addition of adding interactive lessons for guitar and piano, mm that's fresh. Ok so I don't need basic lessons for guitar, I can move around nicely along the fret board, but I've got these long fingers and I have an old school piano in my basement. It's fairly under-used. For that reason I can't wait to try the new garageband and see how well these lessons work. Now as for the other new feature they talk about on the Apple site, the new guitar features. Which means effects and virtual pedals. This is great, I'd love to use them! But they say "Just plug in an electric guitar and play", frankly steve, no. I cannot simply stick the 1/4" guitar jack into the nice little confusing 1/8" line in jack. That doesn't work for me.
I did just find this though, http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/08/06.1.shtml
A nice little cord to shut me up.
iPhoto '09, alright I think this might be my favourite. Have you heard what they put into this clean cut little piece of software? Face recognition, yeah that's ballin'. What's more ballin' for those Facebook photo junkies? Well even if haven't recognized somebody's face and "tagged" them in iPhoto, Facebook will help you out. Apparently if somebody tags one of your photos that you don't already have in your iPhoto library, the tag will sync with your iPhoto library and automatically tag the photos for you. That's pretty sweet. Another great feature in my opinion is the new photo slideshows, I recently hooked up my MacBook to my HDTV (I know I'm kind of a geek), and I wanted to watch a photo slideshow in some high resolution crazy iphoto slideshows. Yeah, iPhoto '08 is not so great for slideshows, I can't get the freaking song I want to play work, and it's about as exciting as watching my cat drink from the tap. Hopefully they make it easier to use, their examples look bomb.
That's a little preview of the just-released iLife '09 slash review of my dusty old iLife '08.
If you've got a mac I'm sure you've already been to this page numerous times, but here's where you can order it or upgrade to iLife '09 http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB966?mco=MzA3MDc5Mg
For those of you who are similar to me, a broke ass student. You can wait for hours trying to download the torrent which last time I checked had 19,000+ people trying to download it at once. That link is here: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4679908/iLife__09_Install_DVD.dmg
Warning: I don't condone downloading this software, support Apple by purchasing the iLife software if you can!
