iLife05 – First Impressions

My copy of iLife05 arrived on Friday. I installed it on my G5 iMac and compared it to iLife04 installed on my dual 1.25GHz G4 PowerMac. All in all, I’m impressed. It was definitely worth the money. I bought the Family Pack for only $20 more, so I have enough licenses to install it on every Mac in my house. (We have five.)

iPhoto has changed the most. The addition of the Adjust window now lets you adjust several parameters that previously required you to use third party applications was the biggest change, though there are other more subtle changes to the interface. iDVD5 not only contains new themes but now sports a progress bar that gives you an idea of how far into the encoding and burn processes you are, a great improvement over previous versions’ horizontal barberpole that only told you it was working. Beside it, there’s even a thumbnail that shows what scene the process is working when encoding. If you know your footage, then you know right where it is. iMovie also sports several sleek interface changes and adds effects and transitions, and Garbage Band does the same. The only downside I’ve seen so far in the package is that encoding in iDVD5 is slower than iDVD4’s when set at “Best Quality”.

I’ll publish a review of the package as soon as I can, hopefully in the next week. Right now, I can tell you I’d rate it four out of five AndyZone CD’s.