Garage Band 3
I had a chance to play with Garage Band 3 on a friend’s Intel iMac over the weekend. The main new features are podcasting and iMovie HD 6 integration. The podcasting features are kind of cool. There is a canned podcast Garage Band template and there are a bunch of loops that are designed to be used for podcasting. I didn’t get to play with the iMovie integration portion but I like the idea of being able to easily compose movie scores in Garage Band.
Although the changes in Garage Band 3 are pretty minimal, the enhancements are pretty cool and I give it a thumbs up. The only thing that really bugs me about iLife 06 is that most of the new features such as iWeb require you to have a .mac account which I’m really not interested in. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little less .mac dependance in these features. I think it would be cool if you could use the new tools to publish to any website (within reason).
While some of the publishing features in iLife 06 don’t really appeal to me, I can see their potential. iLife 06 and iWeb are going to enable people to easily publish rich content. The more people writing the web the better it will be. I love any sort of technology that takes publishing to the masses and enables people to post their content without having to be bothered by technicalities.
I think that you can export to a folder from most of the iLife stuff. I know you have always been able to do it with iPhoto, and from what I can tell iWeb lets you do this as well so you can just FTP the resulting HTML files up to your own folder. The .mac stuff is indeed pushed more than using your own resources, but the nice thing is how integrated it is if you do use it.
I know iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD generally all have very little realiance on .mac accounts (although they can take nice advantage of it).
I knew that you could do that with iPhoto, but that is very cool that iWeb will let you export to a folder that as well. Wow, perhaps I will start using iWeb to publish some stuff. Thanks for the insight smallerdemon!