I’ve just got my copy of iLife ’06 in the mail, and I was rather surprised by the big box it was shipped in. But I was even more surprised by the teeny-tiny CD-square package that was inside. Tiiiiiny! Though if it cuts down waste and all that jazz then that’s fine by me.
I would’ve been perfectly happy to stick with iLife ’05 for another generation, except that iPhoto has become a real slug lately: I don’t do a lot of photography, certainly not compared to some people, but there was some nasty slowdown even with the 7,600 images in my library. iPhoto’s my main reason for upgrading, but a few extra bells and whistles in iDVD and Garageband won’t go amiss. (I’m not even installing iWeb.)
Before the switch I timed iPhoto during it’s slowest-est operations, startup and quit: 69 seconds and 83 seconds, respectively. Awful!
Once the installation, library update and cache rebuilding was all out of the way, and the system had settled down a bit, I timed those again: 9 seconds and 7 seconds, on average. Wow. Plus a whole heap of snappier selecting, editing and browsing goodness. Book layout has returned to being enjoyably slick and they’ve even fixed my favourite bug from the File Export dialog (which reset custom image sizes to default values if you changed the file format). Joy!
And do I need to mention how wonderful full-screen editing is? Do I?
It’s easy to look at the updates to OS X and the iLife suite – particularly regarding speed and the user interface – as false improvements that only look better when compared to their not-as-efficient earlier versions, and that that is the reason why this software gets faster on the same machines, rather than slower (cf: Windows). But right now, I don’t care.
