When I was over at the Apple Store picking up my Macbook, my willpower caved at the packaging of the two new suites from Apple. And since I had a nice store credit in hand, I picked them both up.
Thoughts so far:
The new iPhoto is almost perfect. I didn’t know how much I’d like the new organization metaphor of storing photos in “Events” instead of albums but having used it for just a few minutes I think it’s extraordinary. It makes it much easier to navigate and keep photos organized and does a semi-decent job of auto-discovering and grouping events for you. Even with the auto-discovery, with about 5 years of digital snaps comprising about 7k photos, I’ve got a lot of organizing to do. My biggest wish is that I could somehow use Aperture as my external editor in iPhoto. I love iPhoto’s integration and UI for organizing but its editing is weak compared to Apeture’s (however, I can’t stand Aperture’s unresponsiveness on my MacBook and care even less for it’s UI for organizing photos).
I messed around a bit with Numbers, the new Apple spreadsheet. It’s a joy to use. I’m an Excel power-user — or at least I think I am — and I miss the ability to select non-contiguous cells and apply formating to them. That being said, the templates that come with Numbers really make it clear that Numbers is an Apple application and Excel is an MS application–Numbers’ tempates are stunning. I’m in the process of migrating the household harmony spreadsheet over to Numbers. The conditional formating may take our household mgmt to a whole new levels of geekness.
I haven’t had a chance to futz with the iMovie that many people don’t like as much as its predecessor. Garage Band is as fun as ever.
