I recently purchased a copy of the Apple Mac Box Set. The nice thing about the Box Set is that you get three pieces of software at an incredibly low price. The set includes iLife ’09, iWork ’09, and OS 10.5 Leopard. I made sure the software on my iMac was up-to-date and installed Leopard first, then iLife and iWork. All of the installs went off without a hitch, and soon I was exploring what felt almost like a new computer.
The new features in iLife are great. In iPhoto, you can organize your photographs by Faces, which automatically sorts your photos by who is in them. There are quite a few new features in iMovie as well. Precision Editor gives you much more control over your edit points and there is also a new feature that allows you to smooth out video that is shaky or unstable.
iWork is a really great suite as well. Pages has over 180 pre-designed templates on everything from cards and invitations to certificates and resumes. There is also an option for a full screen view which was lacking in iWork ’08. Of course, what also makes iWork powerful is that it can open Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint files as well as save to a format that the Office suite can read and open.
Leopard’s Time Machine feature is what I was most excited about though. With the addition of an Apple Time Capsule 500GB, I now have a wireless, automatic backup of my computer. I set it up overnight because I knew the initial backup would take some time. Now, for subsequent backups, I have it scheduled to run every twelve hours. The fact that my computer backs itself up automatically is a real weight lifted off of my mind!
