iWork and iLife: Two Bundles with Lots of Surprises

Apple knows what features to add to their software to get users pumped. We’ve been playing with the Cupertino-company’s  twin productivity and entertainment suites iLife and iWork ’09 for a little while now, and the quality of feature upgrades is definitely something to get excited about. If you want the total run-down, check out our full reviews of both. iLife ’09 LAPTOP’s Editor’s Choice Winner iWork ’09 Full Review If you’re on the fence about buying the latest versions, maybe these highlights will push you over the edge. Both suites sell for $79.

iLife Highlights

• GarageBand can teach you how to play an instrument with free Basic Lessons or Artist Lessons, where original artists teach you their songs via tutorials you download for $4.99. Our iLife reviewer learned a lot by listening to Ben Folds discuss his own creative process.
• iPhoto’s new Faces and Places function is a revolutionary way to organize your pics: you can assign names to the faces of friends and family so that the software can tag them automatically; with Places, iPhoto reads the geotags in photos to sort them by, what else?, place, and if photos have no embedded geographical info you can add place information manually.
• iPhoto also supports automatic Flickr and Facebook uploading.
• Amateur film auteurs will enjoy greater sophistication editing videos with iMovie and iDVD.
• iMovie’s new video stabilization takes a while to steady your rocky shots, but it works amazingly well.

iWork Highlights

• Apple’s added Google Docs-esque online collaboration with iWork.com
• Keynote’s new slide show themes and transitions will keep your presentations whipping along in style and panache (pictured kinda).
• With the Keynote Remote app you can control your slide show from an iPhone or iPod touch as long as both the computer and the handheld device are on the same Wi-Fi network.
• New Mail-Merge functionality can integrate information between Pages and Numbers.
• You can link charts made in Numbers to Keynote, which is handy if you need to insert an important graphic into your presentation.

There’s too much goodness jammed into these software bundles to illuminate them all here. Check our full reviews (iWork ’09 or iLife ’09) if you’re a Machead, or potential MacHead, who’s interested in buying iLife or iWork or both.