isteveblog

I wanted to play a little more with the new imovie today. So I shot a few minutes of video of my miata and added one of my songs I recorded with garageband.

Last monday night a few friends and I took at trip to Granby, CT. This is where they hold a very large Cruise Night. If you don’t know a Cruise Night is when a bunch of car crazy people drive to a destination in there custom, rare, over-modified or unique “rods” cars. They sit around eat, listen to music and talk about cars.

We had a great time and saw close to 600 cars. My favorites being a GT 40 and a 440 Cuda. Click on the yellow coupe above to see a small flickr slideshow of some the pictures I took.

Well I spent the whole weekend with my new iMac. The first thing I notice was the display was bright as washed out looking a quick look in the display profiles list I see it’s set to imac. I set it to adobe RGB and there are the beautiful colors, my guess is the stock setting is to match the display to the aluminum case.

I then decide to make a video using the new iMovie. This is a new version and is missing most of the editing functions of the old imovie. You can seemy first imovie here. Apple has a free download of the old iMovie HD 6 for anyone not happy with iMovie 08 “I downloaded it”.

Next is garageband, this got some really nice updates I won’t get into them but we now are come close to a real multitrack digital work station. I took about a half hour to build a song using my acoustic guitar and a bass. Listen here

Now comes iWeb. Apple gave us some nice updates, first new themes much needed and nice looking. Next is the ability to easily embed live media like youtube, google maps and goggle adsense, and photo galleries that use apples new skimming more about skimming later. So I built a iWeb site in about a hour check it out at isteve.us. Not to bad and like most apple apps anyone can use it.

iPhoto got some great improvements first is skimming this feature is used throughout all the ilife suite I can’t explain it so check it out on my iweb site run your mouse over the photo album covers. That is skimming, iPhoto uses this to quickly preview pictures arranged in albums or events. “Events” did you catch that, iphoto will auto arrange your photos by date so everything that was taken on the same day will appear as one picture and moving your mouse of the picture will skim through all the shots taken that day. You can join multiple events to make one event or split one event to many. Also iPhoto has some new ways to quickly navigate through and display all your pictures. This gets a A+.

I just bought a  20″ 2.4 Core 2 Duo 320gig drive and 4Gigs of RAM are on it’s way.

I picked it up last night, I guess around 12:40 am yes that’s right 12:40 AM. See the state I live in is having a “No Tax Holiday” weekend and the guy at the apple store yesterday said that they open at midnight. I figured midnight would be a good time because who buys a computer at midnight… When I showed up at about 11:45 there must of been one hundred and fifty people waiting for the doors to open.

I got home at a little after 1 am and unpacked it, wow this thing is beautiful. It took me about two minutes to plug everything in and push the on button. Being a long time mac user and a .mac member all I had to do was answer a few questions like what time zone I lived in and type in my .mac account password and boom I was up and running. All my bookmarks, logins passwords, preferences were there.

The machine is very quick everything is so much more snappier than my old Dual G4 powermac, it better be. I’m not sure about the glossy screen it is very easy to pick up glare. But on the other hand it looks very crisp and clear and movies look stunning on it.

Well I going to play with the new imovie right now I’ll try to go in with a open mind having been a big fan of the older version of imovie I don’t think I will like this one. I’ll post back about iMovie and post the movie to youtube. Ok one cool thing about the new iMovie you can post your movie directly to youtube. Got to go back latter.

Edit> Just got back from the Apple store one of these little beauties will be mine by the weekend.

Well the Apple media event has brought us some new updates. First of all new iMacs, thinner made of aluminum, glass glossy screen, Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz, up to 4 Gigs of RAM, 250 Gig hard drive up to a Tb onboard, smaller thinner keyboard with media keys, 20″and 24″ starting at $1149. These new iMacs are beautiful.

New iLife 08 plenty of new features in iphoto most having to do wit organizations of photos. .Mac and iphoto now work together auto sync iphoto to a web gallery and let others add photos to your web gallery from remote computers. More .Mac stuf in the future.

iMovie is being replaced with iMovie the name is the same but the app is all new. New way to browse media, scrub through project in a thumbnail mode. Publish movie directly to youtube or .Mac “cool”.

New iDVD.

New iWeb, Live Widgets not sure what that means, Google maps, adsense and youtube integration

New Garageband with Magic Garageband not sure if I care for that feature and I’ not even sure what it does yet. Support 24Bit audio and prints notation. Multi-take recording.

New iWorks new and prettier. Easy to use spreadsheets called Numbers with intelligent tables “sounds like something I could use … I guess”.

Ok tuesday Apple is having a media event. They said it is Mac related so the rumor sites are abuzz about new imacs. The picture above is supposed to be a leaked picture of the new beauty. If there is a new imac and if it looks anything like this and if there isn’t a big price jump… I may be giving Steve Jobs some more of my money.

Also rumors of a new ultralite macbook pro “yea right” and updates to .Mac. We will find out Tuesday.

I stumbled on this great screen still and video capture program called Jing. The cool thing is it also let you do some editing and add text and shapes. It is super easy to use and does a great job and free and multi-platform.

Bellow is a example of what it does.