23% Discount on iLife ‘08
When it comes to the new iLife ‘08, there is a strange anomaly between the prices at the UK Apple Store and the US Apple Store — about 23% infact: before we left Florida, I picked up a copy for $85 (after tax), and yet if I’d waited until I got back to Blighty the very same box would have cost me £55, or around $110 at the current exchange rates. I concede that it is more expensive to do business from a brick-and-mortar store here in England, but I was also thinking about purchasing an activation key from the online Apple Store for the iWork ‘08 30 day trial disk in my iLife box. The cost for a 16 character string? £55. And yet, if I buy the very same activation key from the US Store: $79 (+ $6 tax)… since I’m lucky enough to do my banking in America, I’ll take that 23% discount thank you very much!
But, I digress… I hadn’t really had the chance to spend any time with the new iLife apps until I started transferring the files from my macBook to my iMac in preparation for sending my ailing laptop in for more surgery. The new iPhoto really is mightily impressive! As it upgraded my previously unbrowsable 2400 photo library (partially categorised into manual folders), everything was automatically sorted into “events” by date. It took me another half-an-hour to go through 100 resulting events and add titles (Padmanabhapuram Palace, Kovalam Beach, Kanyakumari… I have a lot of pictures from India!), splitting or merging some of the automatic events as I went. And now, browsing through my photo library is a breeze!
Now that it was so easy to find my way around my pictures, I decided to clean some of them up, and another hour later, with some help from iPhoto, I’d reduced the number of pictures to 2104. Duplicates were easy to find, and there is as nice feature to hide the photographs I don’t want to see most of the time (for those that were too similar to others, or would require a lot of touchup work to be pretty again). Here is the raw image from my camera, taken from a houseboat on the backwaters of Kerala a few years ago. With the much improved photo editing tools I was able to fix the contrast, straighten the horizon, remove an unwanted piece of hemp in the forground, and reframe the picture in literally just a minute… the difference is HUGE!
Another fabulous new feature is the ability to upload directly from iPhoto into my very own Web Gallery hosted on .Mac, which is much easier than the fuss of scaling, uploading and captioning I have to go through to get those very same pictures into Flickr. The interface of the Web Gallery is very slick too, take a look at my test gallery here for a live preview. I’m considering migrating the photo section of azazil over from Flickr, since updating directly from iPhoto is easy enough that I’ll be able to stay on top of it.
If the enhancements to the other applications are even half as good as this (and I’m only really scratching the surface of iPhoto here), then iLife ‘08 is a bargain even with the 23% rip-off-Britain tax 
I can’t wait to sink my teeth into GarageBand now.