Macworld 2009 is underway right now. This will be the last Macworld for Apple, and Philip Schiller took Steve Jobs’ place to give Apple’s keynote at the event. Apple had three product announcements: iLife ’09, iWork ’09 and the new aluminum unibody 17″ MacBook Pro. Nothing revolutionary like the iPhone of 2007 or MacBook Air of 2008. These are mainly evolutionary product updates.
That’s not to say there’s nothing exciting with the products. iLife ’09 has some really neat features in iPhoto: Faces and Places. The new Faces feature offers face detection and recognition. What this means is that iPhoto can detect faces in your photos, and ask you to enter a name. Thereafter, iPhoto can look through your photo collection, detect faces in them, and try to recognize faces that you have identified. You can help it along to fine-tune the recognition process. iPhoto will then give you a new way to browse through all photos according to the identified people.
The Places feature uses geo-tagging information that may be embedded into photos to automatically group photos according to the places they have been taken at. Now I’d wish my Nokia N95 8GB will automatically geo-tag my photos (I think there is a plugin to do that, but I’ve not tried it). In any case, iPhoto lets you enter the geo-tag information manually too. Then, iPhoto can show a map (from Google Maps), with pins over places where you have photos, and zoom in to view your photos by places.
There are also other notable new iPhoto features, Flickr and Facebook integration. The other iLife ’09 applications also have a bunch of new tricks. I haven’t really made use of iMovie yet. I think I should start doing some projects with it.
Probably the most significant upgrade in iWork ’09 is that Apple has made a web-service out of it. iWork ’09 is still an application you install on your Mac. But alongside it, Apple will launch a web-based iWork.com fee-based service to enable users to share their iWork documents online in order to allow collaborative review and editing of the documents.
The aluminum unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros launched last year did not include the 17″ MacBook Pro version. It’s out now, as expected.
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