[X4U] iLife '08 and iWork '08

[Zane H. Healy]

> I'm very interested in iWork '08, too. In particular, the new "Track  
> Changes" features in Pages. If it truly works well with a document  
> that has already been commented in Word (and Word users can see my  
> comments as usual), I'm sold. It's beautiful to look at compared to  
> the way comments liter a page in Word.

Apple is still updating their site, so the store isn't up.  Worse, there is
no sign of an iWork '08 demo.  Having done some more reading Pages is
sounding even more interesting, as it now has "wordprocessor" and "page
layout" modes (I forget their terms).  If it will work better with my
OpenType Fonts, this seems a very appealing solution for me.  I have no
doubt that the new Numbers '08 could handle everything I need to do in a
spreadsheet.

With some more digging I learned that iMovie in iLife '08 is a totally new
application, not an upgrade.  It replaces the old iMovie.  Apparently one of
their developers came back from vacation with a lot of HD footage, and
neither iMovie, or Final Cut would do what he wanted, so he wrote a new
application.

What really made my day though is discovering that the Mac Mini has been
refreshed.  It is now either a 1.83Ghz or 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo based system,
and will take up to 2GB of RAM.  If I could afford it right now, I'd likely
be trying to buy one!  Though I still think the price is about $1-200 to
much.  This is the Mac Mini I've been wanting.

The new iMac's sound interesting, but I think I'll be continueing with a Pro
system when it comes time to upgrade my G5 2x2.

Oh, the other "big" news is iMac now has 10GB of space (20GB for family
pack), rather than the measly 1GB.  The iLife '08 and .Mac family Pack combo
is looking quite interesting to me, even though I have my own servers on the
Internet.  Still $100 per year for a single .Mac account or $179 for a
family pack .Mac account is quite a bit.

One negative to all of this is that the details on the Apple website for
both the iLife '08 and iWork '08 applications are pretty slim.  They don't
give any real details on the things that interest me.

		Zane