Yesterday’s Macworld 2009 Keynote brought no new iMacs or Mac minis, but a lot happened on social media/blogging side: MacRumorsLive was hacked resulting in Steve Jobs news and Twitter still couldn’t handle Macworld traffic. However, the Keynote brought some interesting items to the software side. I comment shortly on two of the announcements which are in my opinion the two most important ones.
I wrote back in June 2007 about rumored geotagging in iPhoto and how that would enable new ways to browse photos and content (yes, there are other products out with these capabilities). Half year later iPhoto ´08 introduced a feature called Events making navigation a lot faster as photos could be grouped. Yesterday Apple introduced iLife ’09 with iPhoto ’09. Now there are two new ways to sort photos: Faces – iPhoto uses face detection to identify faces of people in your photos and face recognition to match faces that look like the same person; you have to tag only a few faces and iPhoto will suggest the rest of the tags. Places is the other option, it uses geotagging to find information about the latitude and longitude of a photo. This information can be supplied either by a newer camera with built-in gps capabilities, or manually by user input (as an example a photo taken at Eiffel Tower is labeled automatically with “France,” “Paris,” and “Eiffel Tower”). There’s also built-in support for Facebook (if a person is tagged by other user in Facebook, the tag gets synced back to your iPhoto) and Flickr (built-in geotagging). You can add, remove, or edit photos, and they’re automatically updated on Facebook and Flickr. Check out a video demonstrating the new features. iLife ’09 is shipping in few weeks, meaning I can get ready to add geotags to my 5,500 photos – could take a few hours…
iPhoto '09
iTunes Store received three changes: The biggest of all is getting rid of DRM (just think about the wasted resources on this). All 10 million songs in the iTunes Store will be offered DRM-free by the end of March (8 million songs are already available DRM-free). Additionally, the iTunes Wi-Fi music store is now compatible with 3G and EDGE, allowing iPhone users to download songs with the same price and quality as from the desktop iTunes. Finally, beginning in April, music companies get more flexibility: the iTunes Store will offer pricing in three tiers ($0.69, $0.99, and $1.29).
Oh, and the Apple Keynote Remote for iPhone is nothing new, but still a handy addition (but it costs 0.79 €).
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