iLife '09 Update: GarageBand

Millions of cheers were heard ’round the world when Phil Schiller announced some of the changes coming to the iTunes Store. The main one: all DRM-free music, meaning that songs can be played and burned without restriction. The four major record companies (Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI) are all now on board with the change, which was crucial to feature songs without the “DRM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management encoding.

Beginning today, over 8 million songs in the iTunes Store feature:

* No DRM restrictions
* Higher-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually unchanged from the original
* Same price for song downloads onto iPhone 3G over their 3G network

The remaining 2 million songs in the 10 million+ iTunes library will be available without the DRM restrictions by the end of March. According to Apple, they will offer a “simple, one-click option to easily upgrade their entire library of previously purchased songs to the higher quality DRM-free iTunes Plus format” for 30 cents per song or 30 percent of the album price. Sounds intriguing, but it could get expensive… I say choose your favorites wisely!

In April, songs will be available at three price points: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. This will be dictated by what the music labels charge Apple for the above licensing.

“Read Apple’s entire press release here.”:http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/06itunes.html

Featured updates:

* Easily create sophisticated animations with *Magic Move.*
* Add dramatic object and text transitions using *new visual effects.*
* Visualize your data with *new styles and animations* for 3D charts.
* Dramatically *reduce file size* without compromising quality.
* Create dynamic flowcharts and diagrams using *connection lines.*
* Choose from *eight new Apple-designed themes* (44 total).
* *Open, save, and email Microsoft PowerPoint files* from within Keynote.

On Monday, Google finally released a public beta of Picasa for the Mac. Picasa is a free desktop app for importing, editing, organizing and sharing digital images–particularly digital photos.

Picasa for Macs is a free download from “Picasa.google.com/mac/”:http://picasa.google.com/mac/. You need an Intel Mac running OS 10.4 or later.

Picasa has been a popular photo app on the Windows side for years. It shares some features with iPhoto, and adds some unique killer features. These include the ability to sync your Picasa desktop and Picasa Web Albums edits, screen captures, create and edit movies within Picasa, add text/watermarks to photos, manage folders on your computer, a collage creation, screensaver creation, and Facial-recognition technology. Privacy and sharing settings can be adjusted for individual photos, collections or for your entire library.

Preliminary tests show Picasa to be as fast or faster than iPhoto and easy and elegant to use. We’ll test further and review Picasa in detail in the future.

Google also offers Picasa Web Albums, which is an excellent web service for sharing and organizing photos. This has been Mac-compatible for years. There is an iPhoto plugin if you want to use Picasa Web Albums without necessarily using the desktop version of Picasa. “Click here to download this.”:http://picasa.google.com/mac_tools.html

Also, the new version of iPhoto ’09 looks amazing. News about Picasa for Mac has been swept under the rug with the announcement of iPhoto ’09.

Picasa Web Albums integrates tightly with Google’s Blogger service, along with many other blog platforms and web services. Picasa Web Albums is very easy to use, uploading is a breeze, and photos are nicely displayed online. Picasa Web Albums offers up to 1GB (“enough space for 4,000 wallpaper-size photos”) of photo hosting for free.

Flickr is still more popular and has deeper social network components then Picasa Web Albums. Again, we’ll do a detailed comparison in the near future.

Pages received a bunch of updates this time around, most notably:

* *40 new Apple-designed templates* (for over 180 total).
* A new *full-screen view* option so that you can focus only on your writing!
* *Dynamic outlines* allow you to organize your ideas as they come.
* *Mail merge with Numbers* makes adding addresses, names and more really simple.
* MathType 6 and EndNote X2 (both sold separately) integration allows you to insert equations or bibliographies (respectively).

As always, you can open, save, and email Microsoft Word files from within Pages.

Grace gave me an advance 60th birthday present just before I left for Macworld. She is taking me to Tanzania to see hippos in the wild. After watching the keynote with the new version of iMovie, we have decided to bring along a digicam, too!

Our friend Chet Newbold from Olympus is going to loan me one of their ultra zoom cameras, too, so I hope to bring back some great photos and video from this trip. I am so excited about fulfilling this dream and spending my 60th birthday in Africa!

I think we are going to see a lot of new products coming out of Apple this year. When they are ready on schedule, I am much more optimistic than most about 2009. I think that Apple is well-suited to innovate its way through this economic downturn.

Thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team
_Don, Kali & Ed_

For several weeks we’ve known that AT&T would finally be introducing the iPhone in Vermont mid-January. The time is almost here. We’ve heard from various AT&T affiliates that the iPhone will be launched in Vermont next week. To commemorate this long overdue occasion, we’ve put all “iPhone 3G”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/x/x/x/iPhone_Accessories|Cases
cases on sale. Every single one. They’re $5 – $10 off, or with a free FM transmitter.

“You can see all iPhone cases by clicking here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/x/x/x/iPhone_Accessories|Cases

We offer dozens of iPhone-compatible speakers, clocks, chargers, and FM transmitters as well. Most of these are listed “in the iPod Accessories category.”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/x/x/x/iPod_Accessories

Regarding iPhone 3G cases, I like the “Contour HardSkin in black.”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag18611/ It makes the phone easier to grip, gives a shock protection, and is relatively low-profile.