Apple unveiled two new iMacs and a slew of application updates at a special event at its Californian headquarters yesterday.
The 20-inch and 24-inch iMacs -- introduced by CEO Steve Jobs -- are the latest editions of Apple's all-in-one iMac design. They are made from aluminum and glass, and come with a new keyboard. Both the new keyboard and the iMac itself are thinner than the previous edition.
Three new iMacs will be available immediately -- two 20-inch models and one 24-inch model. The base 20-inch version will cost US$1,199, and a more powerful 20-inch model will cost US$1,499. The 24-inch model will cost US$1,799, US$200 less than the current 24-inch iMac.
Jobs also announced an update to iLife, Apple's suite of multimedia applications. He said that Apple is skipping right over iLife '07 to release iLife '08.
The primary enhancement to iPhoto '08 is a new feature that sorts by events -- it automatically sorts photos by date and can preview the photos in an event without opening the folder. Events can be "merged" or "split" as needed.
The new iPhoto '08 is designed to work alongside some new .Mac services also unveiled on Tuesday in the US. The .Mac Web Gallery can take photos directly from iPhoto and publish them to a Web page. It syncs up with the iPhone so iPhone users can share their galleries or individual photos.
The Web gallery also incorporates the skimming feature from iPhoto '08, letting users preview photos in a given event or album without having to open the entire gallery.
According to Jobs, Apple will launch a completely new version of the iMovie application with iLife '08. He said the new software came out of an Apple engineer's realisation that he couldn't make a short 5-minute movie in less than half an hour using either iMovie or Final Cut Pro, Apple's high-end video editing application.
The new iMovie allows you to drag and drop movie clips from your library of videos into a new movie template. You can pick how long each individual clip will run, set transitions between scenes and upload those videos to your iTunes, the new .Mac Video Gallery or YouTube right from the menu selections.
Also unveiled were new editions of iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand, the remainder of the iLife suite. The iWeb and iDVD applications received minor updates, but one interesting one involved allowing iWeb users to sign up for Google's AdSense program in the Web site creation process.
Apple's productivity suite, iSuite also received an update. Keynote, the presentation application, comes with several new themes and better support for manipulating photos to serve as background for a slide. Pages, the word processing application, also received updated templates.
But the big part of the new iWork suite is a spreadsheet application called Numbers. Numbers is designed to work with Keynote and Pages, allowing people to drop in pictures, graphs and photos alongside spreadsheet tables. You can also import and export with Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet.
iWork '08 costs US$79 and is available today.
I wish I had a Mac...