Yesterday, Apple delivered what they say will be their last Macworld keynote address. This has always been the event that Apple has blown away fanatics & critics with game changing product offerings. It was at this event two years ago that Apple announced the iPhone.

Most will say there wasn’t any game changers this year. Still, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything I’m excited about from this year’s keynote. Apple unveiled new versions of iLife & iWork, a new 17 inch MacBook Pro model, and announced that all music from the iTunes Store would now be DRM-free. I’ll cover iLife & the iTunes announcement, as those are what got my interest the most.

iLife is Apple’s media organization @ creativity suite that comes on any Mac. Most would agree that there isn’t any other suite that compares to iLife, both in what it can do and for the price. The biggest changes, in what’s known as iLife ‘09, are in iPhoto and iMovie.

Last year, iPhoto gained a feature called Events, that attempted to group your photos according to the date you took them, figure that pictures from a particular day were part of a particular event. This year, Apple added two major features, Faces & Places. They also added themes for slideshows, and Facebook & Flickr integration. Here’s a run down of these features:

• Faces – Apple figures that people are often the most important subjects in your photos. So, why not give the ability to organize your photos by the people in them? Makes sense.

  Faces does this in two ways. First, it recognizes where faces are within a photo and asks you to apply name to the faces. Then, iPhoto will ask you to confirm or decline any other queries on faces it thinks might be the same person. Based on that feedback, iPhoto will learn your Uncle Bob from your Uncle Joe. This can come in useful if say, Uncle Joe would like to see just the photos of himself, as well as some other things I’ll get to in a minute.

• Places – More and more consumer level cameras are coming with GPS chips that enter a geotag into a photo’s metadata. iPhoto ‘09 comes with support for these geotags with Places. What Places does is organize photos depending on the place you took them, so all your photos taken while on vacation in Puerto Rico will be grouped together.

  This makes it easy when uploading your vacation photos online, or creating a slide show or photo book within iPhoto.

• Slideshow have gotten some things added to them this year. Before, slideshows were basically a flip through of your photos with some transitional effects on them. With the addition of themes, slideshows in iPhoto are suddenly not so boring. Slideshow themes include Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns, and Sliding Panels. Also, every slideshow uses face detection to position photos correctly and keep the faces onscreen, so nobody is cut off.

  Very cool.

• Facebook & Flickr integration – Facebook is by far my favorite social networking platform. It allows me to keep up with my friends and former classmates are up to, see when get togethers are happening, and it’s accessible from just about anywhere, like my iPhone.

  Now, iPhoto offers a direct link with an option to upload those photos straight to Facebook with a click. Any album you upload to Facebook shows up on the sidebar like any other album you create, so you can see what photos are in each album. It also takes advantage of the Faces feature and translates that info into Facebook tags, so you can see who everyone is in a photo. Further, if you don’t happen to know who someone is, your friends can tag that person on Facebook and that information is then send back to iPhoto the next time it syncs.

  The Flickr integration works much in the same way, except it uses Places info instead, since Flickr also supports geotags.

iMovie ‘09 is basically a continuation of where iMovie ‘08 took off. I’ve been pleased in how quick you can edit video within iMovie ‘08, without having to be a total geek to do so.

In this years version, they’ve added some really cool audio and video editing tools, a theming option, and a video stabilization feature. All of which are better explained if seen, so feel free to check out Apple’s iMovie tutorials.

Garage Band, the music making and podcasting app, received one major upgrade; music lessons. Now, you can actually learn how to play a guitar or keyboard, with basic lessons that you can control at the pace you desire. When you get through those lessons, GarageBand has a feature called Artist Lessons, that feature musicians such as Ben Folds or Norah Jones, where they’ll walk you through one of their hit songs. Pretty cool.

Moving away from iLife, Apple’s last announcement was that every song sold on the iTunes Store would be DRM-free, a move music lovers have been waiting for. It wasn’t that Apple didn’t want to do this before, they did, but they also wanted to control the price of music where the big four music companies want to set their own prices. Apple finally compromised, so there’s now a tiered pricing system in place. Individual song prices can now be $1.29, $.99, or $.69. There’s also a $.30 per track upgrade fee on any tracks you own from the iTunes Store if you’d like a DRM-free copy.

For the most part, DRM didn’t bother me as I’ve always own some form of iPod for the time I’ve been buying MP3 players. But, there have been instances, such as when I’m streaming music to the PS3, that DRM has become an issue. Taking that limitation off should make a lot of people really happy, as the chains have been restrained.

The talk that Apple didn’t drop anything mind blowing this time around is a little annoying to me in a way. After refreshing the entire line of iPods last September, refreshing the laptop line in October, and doing everything they did with the iPhone within the last six months, what was Apple really supposed to do? We all know Snow Leopard isn’t going to be a major upgrade to Leopard and Apple isn’t going to release that until it’s ready. Outside of updating the iMacs with new graphics, there wasn’t much else for them to touch. Lets face it, upgrading the graphics in the iMac isn’t a whole lot to get excited about, compared to the iPhone or the Intel transition.

What Apple did do, especially in their consumer level suite iLife, was add those things that a lot of companies overlook or do half-assed, and did them right. Really, it’s the finer details that sets Apple above a lot of software and hardware companies, in my opinion. I’d have to see I’m excited about going out and getting the new version of iLife and playing around with it.

For more information on iLife ‘09 and it’s features, go to: http://www.apple.com/ilife/

A couple weeks I sent a message out to everyone on my list on Adium that I would be moving to AIM and if anyone needed to find me, that’s where I’d be.

Not one person switched over.

It’s not that I’m not liked. I usually end up talking to someone online during the day. It’s more of a stubbornness to switch. People I talk to have built up such a base on Yahoo, nobody’s going to move. I went through these same trials with another individual with Skype about a month ago.

The problem I have is that Yahoo Messenger on the Mac is a sad excuse for a program of any kind. It’s buggy (still in beta), eats memory, and just feels bulky. Further, even after over two years of work on the current version, there’s a poor form of voice support and nothing for conferences.

Meanwhile, I have this app that came with my Mac, iChat, that sits dormant for the most part. I’d much rather use this slice of technology for many reasons.

iChat’s voice support is by far the best available on the Mac. Further, I can get a multi-person voice conference going in seconds, which I can then import into Garage Band and start a radio-style podcast if I like. Video chats are also awesome on iChat, with some neat features embedded into that option. I can share photos and video in full screen as well as start a video conference in full screen with up to three other people, all in the H.264 codec, giving near HD quality.

Further, iChat just feels like part of my system, where other applications feel, well, like they’re from a third party. I’ve managed to work with Adium, the great multi-client IM client for the Mac, but it offers no video or voice.

So, I’m taking this time to appoligize to iChat for never using you. It’s nothing personal.

Saw a message on my Twitter feed about an iPhone app called Ambiance. So I went to check it out and found it’s a 99 cent app that plays soothing sounds, such as birds or an ocean.

To my surprise was how realistic the sounds on this app are. Most of us have probably heard many of the sound included in real life, so take my word for it they translate well on this app.

Well worth the 99 cents.

Yup, all the computer is in there!

LAst Saturday, Mom and I took the old HP computer into BestBuy too see if the Geek Squad there could figure out how to get the thing working. Upon start-up, the computer would give the classic Windows blue screen with error messages nobody really understands. The associate there said that to do a diagnostics check and repair would run $199, not worth it due to the age of the computer.

So, I talked mom into getting a Mac Mini. The MacMini is what you see above, a compact little box that comes with all the guts of a typical tower. That arrived today.

Setup was quick and easy. I simply plugged everything into it’s right slot; it even came with an adapter to support the VGA monitor from the old HP. After the necessary software updates, I got her set up.

I’m really happy to get mom on a Mac because there’s some things I’m really looking forward to playing with:

iChat

Apple’s own messageing client, it supports the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service, Google’s GTalk service, as well as Apple’s MobileME service. I set mom up with an account and instantly went to work.

One thing about iChat that I love, and finally got to play with, is screen sharing. In short, I’m able to take control of mom’s Mac from my Mac, with her permission. This is going to be really useful to show her around and help her out with learning this computer.

Additionally, I’ll be able to do text and voice chats, obviously, as well as share photos and videos in full screen for her enjoyment. So, say I go to Lake Tahoe once I’m out in the Reno area, I can show her my excursions from right within iChat.

iPhoto and MobileMe Gallery

Another way I’ll be able to share photos is through my MobileMe gallery. If you check out any of the albums at http://gallery.me.com/skoo402/ , you’ll see an option to subscribe at the top. What this does is give you the option to keep up with any photos I add to that album, either through a RSS Reader, or through iPhoto. If you choose the iPhoto option (assuming you’re on a Mac), iPhoto will check for any new photos in any album you’ve subscribed to and instantly download them to your own Mac. From there you can do anything you liek with them, wether it be simply setting one as your background, to ordering prints or making a photo book, something you can also do within iPhoto.

In short, I really look forward to staying connected once I move to Reno next week. I’m speaking from personal experience when I say this, but you will be hard pressed to find a better option for staying in touch with family and friens than with a Mac. It simply caters to this kind of thing.

Any questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll address them either in the comments, or if I feel it needs it, within another post.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, one of America’s leading tech experts, spoke out on a few things of interest, at least for me, at an executive summit for Beet.tv in Washington on April 1.

First, he speaks on the purchasing of digital media. Although there’s still a lot of people who illegally download content, wether it’s music, tv shows, or movies, there’s proof that people will buy this sort of content online. For example, Apple’s iTunes Store just passed Walmart for #1 in music sales, online or offline. Really this make sense. I’m one of those people that wether I buy an album on iTunes or purchase it in a store, it will become a digital copy that I can use to put on my iPod, play within iTunes in a mix, or stream to my Xbox 360 while playing a game. The same goes for movies and TV shows. Fox just recently started releasing their DVD’s with a “digital copy” on the disc, one that you can transfer to your computer and play on your iPod if you choose.

TV shows have been another successful area for Apple. I’ve personally have bought a few shows, one of those being season one of America’s Game, the NFL Network’s excellent documentary series on Super Bowl champions. This is a series I would not of seen otherwise since Time Warner Cable has b.s.’d it’s way out of carrying the channel. What I purchased was a totally commercial free version of the show in good quality that I can use however I like.

Another method I’ve started using is recording shows straight to my computer using my EyeTV Hybrid, a small device and software package that turns my computer into a DVR. The cool thing about the software is that I can actually go in and edit out the commercials. This is one of the points I was glad to see Mossberg bring up. As you know, during most 30 minute shows, you will see about eight minutes of what Mossberg calls “terrible” commercials. He puts it this way because, let’s face it, most of the commercials you see really don’t appeal to you. So, it’s become understandable for people to pay not to see commercials, much in the way people are now paying for commercial free radio with Sirius and XM. Essentially, people are growing tired of the crap that’s being force fed to them.

Another thing Mossberg brought up is out poor quality of internet service in the US. This is possibly one of those deals where you don’t miss what you’ve never had. But now knowing that Europe and Japan are getting fast internet speeds than we are and that what many DSL providers are calling “broadband” would only pass for what we pay $10 for in the States in Europe is appalling. Secondly, cable companies frequently false advertise the speeds they’re giving you as well, often giving you less than half of what’s advertised while vastly overcharging you for it. Mossberg says this is where the next Presidential regime needs to step in.

Lastly, Mossberg mentions that we should be seeing the 3G version of the iPhone in the next 60 days or so. This falls in line with many other reports on the beautiful little touch screen device that does just about everything and embarrasses other cell phones while doing so. Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference is set for early June and with the newly release software development kit (SDK) being released in March and numerous training sessions set for the iPhone at WWDC, there’s been plenty of speculation. Also, the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 software update is due for June. Additionally, iPhone inventories have been low in all the locations the device is sold and T-Mobile Germany has even gone as far as giving a 300 Euro price drop in it’s stores. It’s all adding up.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Last night, I learned that the best iPhone/iPod touch jailbreaking tool, ZiPhone, finally released a version that supported the newer releases of the iPod touch (which I have). So, I restored the 1.1.4 firmware so that my iPod touch was back to factory settings, then ran this software. 45 seconds later, I was jailbroken and off to the races with playing around. The above shot shows off the Summerboard theme I’m using.

For those that are totally confused, “jailbreaking” is how iPhone/iPod touch users can use third-party applications on their device, not to mention change the overall appearance.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Last night, I learned that the best iPhone/iPod touch jailbreaking tool, ZiPhone, finally released a version that supported the newer releases of the iPod touch (which I have). So, I restored the 1.1.4 firmware so that my iPod touch was back to factory settings, then ran this software. 45 seconds later, I was jailbroken and off to the races with playing around. The above shot shows off the Summerboard theme I’m using.

For those that are totally confused, “jailbreaking” is how iPhone/iPod touch users can use third-party applications on their device, not to mention change the overall appearance.

When I bought my iPod Touch, I did so to fill the void I had when my iPhone was stolen last year. Part of that void was the brilliant technology embedded in the device.

Part of that technology is the accelerometer inside the device, that detects which way the phone is turned. This come into play when looking at pictures and webpages. With the SDK (software development kit) being released soon for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it is expected that games from third party developers will be available, making these devices even more breathtaking.

The video here is a game I’m really looking for, called Trism, that is reminiscent of games like Tetris or Bejeweled. I usually get hooked on games like this, so if I stop blogging or lose contact for a while, there’s a chance I could be playing this a lot.

When I bought my iPod Touch, I did so to fill the void I had when my iPhone was stolen last year. Part of that void was the brilliant technology embedded in the device.

Part of that technology is the accelerometer inside the device, that detects which way the phone is turned. This come into play when looking at pictures and webpages. With the SDK (software development kit) being released soon for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it is expected that games from third party developers will be available, making these devices even more breathtaking.

The video here is a game I’m really looking for, called Trism, that is reminiscent of games like Tetris or Bejeweled. I usually get hooked on games like this, so if I stop blogging or lose contact for a while, there’s a chance I could be playing this a lot.

There’s a day in January where I stop everything and block out all the really important things in life. That would be the day Apple CEO Steve Jobs gives his yearly Macworld keynote speech.

Last year, this was the stage Jobs used to announce the iPhone. That gadget (which I still miss very dearly) won Time Magazine’s “Invention of the Year”. I could almost see that as an understatement having actually used one.

I love Apple. I officially became a switcher about two years ago, after I bought my first-generation Intel-based iMac two years ago. That product was also unveiled at Macworld in 2006. In short, something will be announced today, and only Steve Jobs himself knows what it is until it spills out of his own mouth onto the masses of eager Mac-loving puppies waiting for their treats. So, expect updates later, after I’ve had an opportunity to watch the keynote about two or three times on Apple’s website.

I just wish I didn’t have class today.