Bug-Man’s Blog

Before I start, “STEVE JOBS JUST DIED” was the first message posted to the hijacked macrumorslive.com feed, and while it was funny for a few minutes, I soon got very annoyed at the sheer idiocy of the hijackers. This particular feed is, usually, the best one to follow, so it was a shame that it quickly became worthless.

The surprises from Apple this year were not that exciting. New iWork stuff including iwork.com for online office work, which seems to be a big thing lately. Apple, Microsoft and Google are all doing it. It may be interesting to see what comes of that but Apple’s online services have been of very little interest to me so far, considering how little Mobile Me does for me at the moment.

iLife ‘09 — about the only useful part of this package is iPhoto, if you even use it. The main problem with iLife is that you need to buy it as a whole package, even if you don’t want iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand. And I don’t. I’ve used iMovie before, for a while, but that was in my YouTube hey day.

Until recently I have been keeping my photos in a directory structure on my computer (backed up of course) and not used any particular software to manage it. Even more recently I was toying with Aperture. Now the Keynote came out with all of these cool-sounding features in iPhoto that I WANT!

A library that allows you to organise by event/place, facial recognition that will find faces and let you tag who they are, then intelligently guess who it thinks faces belong to in your other photos. But not only that, there is Flickr and Facebook integration which means that if anyone tags anyone else in your photo, that tag is instantly downloaded and merged into your library. I’ve often found having your own private meta-data that isn’t compatible with other systems most annoying!

I’m quite interested in this facial recognition stuff, and I really want to see what it’s all about.

Geotagging - again, totally cool and being used more and more. I’m eager to play with iPhoto ‘09. Sadly, Apple does not offer a trial version if iLife, so I’ll be waiting to play with it by some other means, and hopefully these features make it to Aperture quickly!

On other notes, the MacBook Pro 17″ with the new unibody is not much of a surprise, not not of great interest to me because I don’t use the 17″. No news on iPhone, and some stuff about iTunes store, which I don’t use very much for music at the moment. At least there’s a general price reduction on music and it’s now DRM free. Yay!

So Apple won’t be at the next one, so what does that mean for next year?