iLife '04 is worthy upgrade, but it's not perfect
The new software — $49 for a single-user copy, $79 for a five-license home user — is billed as improving the worst annoyances in iPhoto and iMovie, while extending your ability to move photos, music and movies among the various packages.
Apple said iPhoto 4 could handle up to 25,000 photos, while my experience with iPhoto 2 showed slowdowns when you hit hundreds of pictures. I believe the new number is not marketing hype.
On various Macs of old and new vintage, I found remarkably faster launch time and response time, even with libraries of several thousand photos, which results in less frustrating sorting and navigation. In many cases, the spinning rainbow cursor used to freeze iPhoto for up to 30 seconds and occasionally minutes.
Now, response is immediate or within a second or two. (iPhoto is at version 4, jumping number 3, to keep number parity with the other older iLife applications.)
iPhoto still suffers from three key weaknesses that disqualify it from being my primary and favorite image-management program:
• It has to copy each image into its own folder, rather than referencing it elsewhere, which is designed for importing a single copy from a digital camera.
• It can handle only static media of the most common image file types, like JPEG and TIFF, but not QuickTime or AVI.
• You can't easily search and sort beyond a few simple choices.
For all of these tasks, I turn to iView Media Pro (www.iview-multimedia.com/), a full-feature, digital media cataloging tool, including superior template-based Web photo-gallery options. However, iView's package is $160, while iLife has five software programs for $49.
iMovie also has improved speed and has become easier to use, although perhaps not a full version number's worth. iDVD's great improvements include some attractive new templates for projects and the ability to put up to two hours of a movie on a single DVD, nearly double what competing products and the older iDVD could squeeze onto a disc.
I plan to devote a full feature to GarageBand soon. Despite my earlier comments about the program's difficulty level in making real music, I've purchased a USB adapter for an old MIDI (standard music interface) keyboard in the basement and have started learning to play the piano for the third time in my life.
Nonstarter: My brother-in-law Mike, my wife, Lynn, and I trekked to the Apple Store in University Village on the day Apple released iLife '04 to buy our family pack. We returned home and immediately, heedlessly started installing the new applications. Well, Mike and I did. Lynn, the early, prudent rejecter, waited to see the outcome of our folly, as she has by continuing to run Jaguar instead of Panther.
My installation went fine, but Mike hit a roadblock: His thousands of photographs from his year skiing in the United States, traveling around North America and touring Australia and New Zealand were locked away in iPhoto, and iPhoto 4 wouldn't launch. Being resourceful, he found other early adopters online and ferreted out the solution: A few files had to be deleted before iPhoto would run.
In your Home folder's Pictures folder, nestled in the iPhoto Library folder, you'll find files named Thumb32.data, Thumb64.data and ThumbJPG.data. With iPhoto 4 not running, move those files out of the folder; hold onto them just in case.
Now run iPhoto. It will re-create those thumbnail files and run properly. If not, consult Apple's discussion boards in the support section of their site. Apple hasn't posted this solution yet, but users have a variety of workable advice.
Washington Mutual and Safari: I received dozens of e-mail messages from folks about my Dec. 27 column in which I described Apple's software weaknesses, some of which were addressed with the iLife '04 release.
One particular problem I heard much about was my inability to pay bills on Washington Mutual's Web site. It's clear that Safari 1.0 under Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) worked fine for me and continues to work for many readers with WaMu's site. Something changed in Panther (10.3) with Safari 1.1.
Doug Manis wrote in with the solution. It's obscure, and it fixed the problem for me and other colleagues who tried it.
Open System Preferences by selecting it from the Apple menu. Click the International icon. In the Language tab, click Edit. Make sure "U.S. English" (not just "English") is checked. Click OK. Now find "U.S. English" in the Languages list. Drag it to the very top. Close System Preferences and quit Safari if it's running.
When I ran Safari again, the mysterious euro symbol that I saw instead of a dollar sign was gone, and I was able to pay bills as with Safari 1.0. Thanks, Doug!
Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists