Apple Products Reviews and Newsletter Resources

GarageBand (part of iLife 08)

 GarageBand (part of iLife 08)provides everything you need in a personal recording studio, including arranging, mixing, editing as well as recording. The program allows you to compose a song using the computer keyboard or connected instruments, record a song from connected instruments and virtual instruments, arrange, edit, and mix a song to create a professional quality CD or podcast. A composition can also be printed to provide sheet music. The program also allows you to build a virtual band by selecting from songs and instruments, including selection of a part in the band for the user.

Click here to read the detailed review by The Macintosh Guild.

iWeb 08

iWeb is a web design and development tool, providing professional quality web pages/site with a wide selection of options for developing web pages. iWeb includes all of the necessary tools to create a web presence, including themes, text manipulation, photos, hyperlinks, blogs, anything you want to include to make a web page/site. The professional quality themes are designed with multiple page sites that can be easily customized with the users personal information. The web site can be published using this software. It is simple to use so that any casual computer user could design and publish a personal web page or web site of highest quality in a short time and with no web design experience."

Click here to read the detailed review by The Macintosh Guild.

iWork 08

The new iWork 08 is a good deal for $79 if you need an affordable office suite. While the features in the package are not as rich as in Microsoft Office, it covers much more than just basic tasks. iWork applications can read Microsoft files and can save files in older formats. Installation is easy. The addition of Numbers added a spreadsheet to the suite, making it a fully rounded out suite. The suite offers attractive and intuitive interfaces, new features for image editing, page layout and printing and the applications integrate will with each other, with iWeb, and with iLife.

Read the review from the Main Line Macintosh Users Group.

iLife 08

The new iLife suite of applications consists of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and Garage Band and it comes pre-installed, at no additional charge, on every new Mac. iLife buyers receive 90 days of unlimited free telephone support for installation, launch, or reinstallation. New users especially will appreciate the video tutorials and downloadable "getting started" documents available on the Apple website. They make it look easy, and in most cases, it is.

Upgraders, however, are likely to have a more mixed reaction.

Read the review from the Main Line Macintosh Users Group.

iLife 08

The new iLife suite of applications consists of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and Garage Band and it comes pre-installed, at no additional charge, on every new Mac. iLife buyers receive 90 days of unlimited free telephone support for installation, launch, or reinstallation. New users especially will appreciate the video tutorials and downloadable "getting started" documents available on the Apple website. They make it look easy, and in most cases, it is.

Upgraders, however, are likely to have a more mixed reaction.

Read the review from the Main Line Macintosh Users Group.

Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard)

The 6th major release of Mac OS X is here. The long awaited release was delayed due to resources needed for the iPhone but it finally shipped on October 26th. There are over 300 new features in Leopard. Time Machine is arguably the biggest new feature but there are many other features that make this new OS well worth the $129 asking price. For the purposes of this review I am going to focus on a few of my favorites. These include Cover Flow, Quick Look, Spaces, the new versions of Mail and iCal, and last but not least, Stacks.

Read the Review from the Main Line Macintosh Users Group.

Apple Remote Desktop

The new Apple Remote Desktop has a new face, new guts, and new glory. Version 3 has so many new tools that will make IT professionals drool. It can support a few computers on a network for a small business, up to thousands of computers in a school system or a large corporation. It is not perfect, but it packs a punch and it's worth its price.

The new Apple Remote Desktop has a new face, new guts, and new glory. Version 3 has so many new tools that will make IT professionals drool. It can support a few computers on a network for a small business, up to thousands of computers in a school system or a large corporation. It is not perfect, but it packs a punch and it's worth its price.

Read the review from the Main Line Macintosh Users Group.

Keynote 3

Keynote 3 has evolved and expanded on its past strengths with new and unique capabilities, such as polished templates, cinematic transitions, textured 3-D charts, Bezier curves and masking, tables with calculations, and export to iDVD and iPhoto. I found it exciting and fun to create and edit slides in Keynote versus doing it in PowerPoint. Keynote continues to eat into the well established world of Microsoft's PowerPoint. Compatibility between the two applications has increased substantially since the early days of Keynote 1. There are still some drawbacks, to Keynote, such as resizing images in Light Table view and the way Keynote handles missing fonts. As Mac OS X software continues to grow with innovative features, and new and cost competitive Mac laptops and desktop computers increasing Apple's market share, Keynote will be in the hands of more and more professionals and managers, yielding snappier, smoother and more professional presentations.

Click here to read the detailed review by The Macintosh Guild.

Apple's Final Cut Pro

Apple's Final Cut Pro is clearly a robust and flexible tool for performing first line professional quality video editing. It is a complex product that requires significant time to learn to become a proficient editor. It's professional design provides multiple interface and control methods to allow its use to be tailored to the style of the individual editor. FCP's effective integration enables well trained users to be very efficient in high volume video production environments. The application runs efficiently, provides an ample selection of special effects to support creative techniques, and appears to have an ongoing development path. Though FCP can be used by amateur video enthusiasts, it is likely out of budget reach due to the fact that you must purchase the complete Final Cut Studio in order to get the application. The fact that FCP is now the cornerstone of the Final Cut Studio bundle makes it a good value for professional users because of the other included applications.

Click here to read the detailed review by The Macintosh Guild.

Apple's Motion 2.1

Apple's Motion 2.1 is a motion graphics program for the creation of awesome special effects, animation, typographical treatments and particle generation for standard-definition and high-definition video. While Motion isn't an After Effects killer, it could be After Effects' killer app. Motion 2 is not a huge leap forward from Motion 1, but a lot of rough edges have been smoothed, and an essentially good idea has been made demonstratably better (and faster). Some may find that it makes certain aesthetic choices so easy that it tends to promote them in a subtle way, and if I had to speculate as to why it hasn't seen broader adoption in video post, that would be my guess -- I occasionally found myself struggling to execute ideas which didn't involve anything gliding, changing opacity or replicating, and that is a little bit unsettling somehow. On the whole, though, with its easy-to-live-with UI and gentle learning curve, Motion has a low barrier to entry and plenty to offer as an animation tool for those who are already using the Final Cut Studio suite.

Here is a Review of the product by The Macintosh Guild User Group.