So, after many rumors and anticipation to what Apple was about to unveil for us this January, Philip Schiller (Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple) took the stage as Apple Inc. for the last time at a MacWorld – Apple will not be taking part in the 2010 MacWorld in San Francisco, CA. The keynote was very Steve Jobs like, talking about the market, the walk-in stores around the world and their success throughout 2008. He said he had three announcements.
First, came iLife ’09. iPhoto with the new features as Faces (face recognition) and Places (events mapping), and the very cool export to Flickr and Facebook features – both were possible before with third-party plug-ins, so now that it’s all integrated it makes it really cool. Then, there’s iMovie, with the Advanced Drag and Drop features, Themes and Maps, and – what really looks cool- Precision Editor. One of the coolest upgrades is Garage Band. It has basic lessons for guitar and piano, but also Artists Lessons. This is by far the coolest thing for anyone learning to play… Sting teaching you Roxanne or Sarah McLachlan teaching you Angel. Also additional guitar rigs are included so you can sound like an actual rockstar legend. iWeb had also updates and tight Facebook integration, and all though this was not on Phillip Schiller’s keynote, it’s worth mentioning. By linking your iWeb site to your Facebook account, after an update, iWeb adds the changes to your profile, alerting your friends and providing them with a handy link.
Second announcement, iWork ’09. As an iWork user, I’m very happy to see all the updates they got into Pages, Numbers and Keynote. For those who are not familiar with iWork, it’s Apple’s version of Microsoft’s Office. All three apps can open and save Word, Excel and PowerPoint Files and get the basic stuff done. Pages has more ways to share documents with Word users, a full screen mode to isolate the writing from instant messaging, email and all sorts of distractions, an enhanced template chooser, dynamic outlines (to help you with structure your ideas so you can write better and more easily) and Mail merge with Numbers and the Address Book. Numbers has also a new spin: advanced charting (which includes Linking charts with Pages and Keynote- much like Word, Excel and PowerPoint have been able to do so for a while), and table categories, easier way to create formulas and a very handy Formula List View. Keynote has stronger animations, more commercial transitions and chart animations, but the coolest thing that I want to try is the Keynote Remote for the iPhone. As a Keynote user that was what I needed. I can carry around the Apple Remote, but the less stuff I go carrying, the better. Makes perfect sense to let the iPhone or iPod Touch let you control your presentation from anywhere in the room using Wi-Fi. You’ll be able to see the slides with notes or both the current slide and the next slide in the palm of your hand. Just swipe to advance, a very natural thing now on the iPhone. Adding to all that there’s iWork.com, a way to share the iWork documents online. In a free public beta, until the final product is released that will eventually be a pay service. I presume that it will be an annual fee like MobileMe service, though they haven’t announced pricing yet.
And the third announcement, the long awaited update for the 17″ MacBook Pro. It looks great, apparently has a battery that lasts up to 8 hours (which I’d love to test!), with NVIDIA graphics processor,aluminum casing, 3 USB 2.0 ports, 1 FireWire 800 port, Mini Display Port for the new Apple LED Cinema Display. The screen is glossy, but from what Philip Schiller says, there will be able an anti-glare fee of US$50 that I’d be willing to pay to get the glare out. It comes with a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive. What’s most amazing is its size: less than an inch thin and weighs just 6.6 pounds.
Hope you enjoyed my insight on the MacWorld announcements. Stay tuned for an upcoming review throughout the weekend for FontExplorer X Pro, the new (not longer free) version of Linotype’s Font Explorer in the next few days, which offers the long waited CS4 integration of the font management application to the mac.