Only 2 days to go until Apple unveils its new products at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and I am so excited.
Up until now, I completely forgot that every year, coinciding with the Macworld is the release of a new iLife, this year being iLife ’06 (surprise surprise!). And what will Steve Jobs have in store for us this year with the new iLife… Some mistakes on the Apple site (Screenshot) have revealed that therer is a new addition to the iLife suite, iWeb. This will most probably be a web authoring tool, similar to Dreamweaver or possibly Rapidweaver which will incorporate all of Apple’s trademark simplicity, its integration with the rest of the iLife suite and power to do professional things in a consumer orientated program… It may even be similar to Pages, Apple’s 2005 offering to the world. The only problem that Pages had was that the HTML export feature was incredibly dire, it didn’t take into account all of the separate layers and layout of the document, pretty much the document’s foundation, which therefore made that feature next to useless. Hopefully iWeb will build on this and be an app that has the flexibility and simplicity of Pages yet has the power of Dreamweaver. Expect .Mac and iLife integration for sure and any other magical things Apple will throw in.
If you read carefully the text on the above linked Screenshot, you will notice that it mentions adding video to GarageBand, thus making it a better tool for video podcasting (if that so suits you) and film script composing. Over the last few years, GarageBand has been adding new features more akin to pro applications, such as multi-track recording and music on staves in 2005 and now in 2006, video integration, which is already part of Logic and Soundtrack.
Most probably, hardware will be realeased too at the Expo, this will hopefully include widescreen Intel iBooks, something we’ve all been waiting for, and possibly a media centre Mac mini, also powered by Intel, with the new Viiv technology. Expect also a completely “out-of-the-blue” release such as a Airport Express video streamer or an iPhone!
It will be good, and the wait for it will always be worth it!