Kiwis Eye: Is iLife becoming too .Mac attached?
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 26, 2006 at 1:20am
Glenn Wolsey is the “Macsimum News” man in New Zealand. He offers news and opinions with a “Kiwi perspective” whenever the spirt moves him.
The new iLife ‘06 is an amazing upgrade to the iLife suite; the new features are single-handedly changing the way we use our Macs and the way we create, organize, and view media. Yet .Mac is starting to become a dependent part of iLife, especially if you want to use iLife to its full potential and employ use of all its features.
No argument, iWeb is an exceptional application, with prodigious potential, but it relies on .Mac to publish your site more than you would like. It offers no simple way to upload your site to a normal web-server from the application, Apple is almost forcing the beginner user, who is new to iLife, to purchase a .Mac subscription. What new Mac user knows how to export a site from iWeb, open and connect to a FTP server, and upload the files? Not too many, I’d guess.
One of iPhoto’s new features is Photocasting. Click on an image in your iPhoto library, click the Photocast button, and the image is now included in your personal Photocast feed on your .Mac account. Sounds nice, but what about those without .Mac? I think we’ll pass on that.
Do you get the picture? Apple needs to offer simple, easy ways for those without .Mac to get there content out there. My thought: Apple should offer .Mac as a free service. This would make the iLife suite much more appealing to users, as they could use all of its features without having to splash out more cash.
Anyhow, none of this takes away from the fact that iLife is a wonderful software suite, which I dearly love, and I use daily. Look out for a full iLife 06 review in the next few weeks.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
