So, a friend of mine from work showed me some stuff he’d been messing around with in GarageBand – Apple’s music tool that ships with iLife. I’ve had it installed on my Mac since I got it, but never really messed around with it. After I got a chance to see it in action, though, it reminded me a lot of Sonic Foundry’s Acid, which I really enjoyed playing around with.
GarageBand isn’t as powerful as Acid, no doubt – at least, to me, it’s strangely not as immediately accessible. But it does a lot of what Acid does, and it’s free. I’ve got Acid Pro 3.0 lying around, but I can’t seem to ever find the CD Key and the CDs at the same time, so it’s been unused, unfortunately.
But finding GarageBand, and also finding out that it’s actually not only useful, but fun to use, has made me poke around iLife a bit more. Turns out, I ended up using iMovie to edit a clip of Serenity for use in a pitch presentation I’m giving at work. Took a little poking to figure out everything I needed, but it’s relatively straightforward, and looks like all I’d really need to actually do movie editing if I wanted to.
It’s strange – in the same way that the iPhone may not do more than most Windows Mobile phones, but it makes the functionality *accessible*, I feel like the Mac does *more* than the PC did, simply because it’s there, and it’s easy to use.
iLife gives me the ability to edit video easily, create music easily, manipulate my photos easily (except that introductory phase, which sucked, and its inefficiency, which still sucks), make a competent DVD, and basically take care of whatever media mishmashing I want to. It also integrates really well with Keynote and Pages, which I’ve used for work-related stuff.
Keynote, for the record is fucking *AWESOME*. It’s so far beyond Powerpoint in terms of ease of use and visual style that it’s hard to actually describe its value. The difference in impact between the presentations I used to make in Powerpoint for work, and the current thing I’m doing in Keynote is indescribable. If I had to estimate its value, functionally, I’d say the difference could literally be the difference between getting this pitch into the pipe and not, simply because it looks better, and as a result, it conveys information more easily.
I’ve been really happy with my Mac. The functionality’s just awesome, it feels great, it’s sufficiently powerful for anything I want to do, and I’m constantly surprised by *what* I can do with it.
My sole problem is that I have yet to find a browser that doesn’t behave really oddly in some fashion. I haven’t spent a lot of time with Safari, but I threw my hat in the ring with Camino, and it’s fine, except for the fact that it periodically completely loses its mind, and becomes unable to read the *format* of a webpage, and then just periodically stops loading anything. A quick restart of the browser fixes the problem, but it’s sort of a pain in the ass, given that it’s probably the application I use the most.
That said, I’m floored by the quality of the laptop, and the sheer volume of bizarre stuff that I can do with it easily.
I love to complain about my Mac and Apple, but at the same time I insist on using a Mac whenever possible. At the end of the day, I think the Mac OS X platform is really solid and there are some tremendous applications available for it that aren’t like anything I’ve seen on other platforms (Keynote is among these). On one level, I think I gripe just to convince myself I’m not a zealot.
But I do have some legitimate gripes with Apple’s applications particularly iLife. I think what they are trying to do with it is dead on, but their implementation has too many gotchas. To me, iLife is like a bag of delicious candy that occasionally has a random piece of glass in it. I’m still using iLife 05, so maybe my pet peeves really are fixed.
I should also admit I have some great iLife success stories. In addition to doing a number of fun movies in iMovie, I’ve also made some really professional DVDs for my family and my officemate with iDVD, and a family calendar with iPhoto that my family liked so much they ordered 11 copies of ($220 in calendars from one family).