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14 Jan 2006
iLife 06
I looked what Steve Jobs had to say on the iLife 06 suite. There are some things relevant for MicroContent clients. I have no chance yet to test these apps. I am not sure I find this update worthwhile to pay for the new versions (no upgrade available).
iPhoto - the application for managing your images. I saw mainly new features for editing images. There are now functions to create calendars and cards from images. Should I call this MacroContent? It does allow a user to mash MicroContent Items and create something new. The most interesting new thing is photocasting. This works only (stupid) in combination with .Mac and it is extremely easy to publish a list of photo's. And that is how it should work. It reminds me of iCal by the way. iPhoto can also be used to subscribe to these remote list of photo's. It is based on RSS, but not quite standard. Interestingly iPhoto recognises links that contain a photocast.
iMovie - the client for creating movies. It has some new stuff for creating video's. Naturally iMovie can be used to create videocasts.
iTunes - the client for viewing and listening to audio and video.
Garageband - the application for the creation of audio, music and voice. It can now be used to create podcasts. He calls it a podcast studio. What I find interesting is the artwork that changes in time. Does this make a podcast some sort of video? What is the standard here? But it is great way to create this MicroContent type.
iWeb - this is really a missing application in this suite. Although .Mac allowed to create websites, this app shows that a client is much easier to create a website. And this app seems to be pretty easy to use. But is it .Mac only? One could see this app as a MicroContent masher. It is easy to add audio, playlists, images and blog items. It would be create if one could add other MicroContent types. The application also supports RSS-feeds, photocasts and videocasts. Seems a great step forward.
iDVD - for creating DVD's. One could call this a MicroContent mash-up client.
As a last thing to note: these apps work great together, which makes mashing even more easier. At the moment one mashes only on a single platform, but it should be possible to add in external MicroContent as well. The principles are already there.