The New iLife Lives Large on the Web

IPhoto, the other iLife program to get a thorough round of revisions, also aims to speed the process of pushing your work online. But Apple didn't sacrifice its editing features in the process.

After you've copied photos to a Mac, now grouped by when they were taken instead of when they were transferred, you only need to click the "Web Gallery" button instead of switching to iWeb, as iPhoto required before.

In a few minutes, your pictures will appear in a "Web gallery" on Apple's .Mac site. (In addition to 10 gigabytes of Web storage, .Mac offers e-mail service, file backups and data synchronization among multiple Macs.)

These galleries are slick, flashy productions, on a par with Yahoo's Flickr. You can limit access by passwords or make them public, and you can even invite other people to add shots of the same event.

In their favor, Flickr and other services offer free photo storage but require extra software to provide the same ease of uploading as .Mac. (Apple's recent decision to welcome developers of these add-on programs should increase their availability.)

The magnitude of the changes to iPhoto and iMovie may have caused Apple to rush their development, judging by the bugs seen in each. For example, iMovie rejects periods and other punctuation in movie-project titles, and iPhoto stopped letting me rename some photo collections.

The rest of iLife should be more familiar to those used to earlier versions. The GarageBand music editor now offers a "Magic GarageBand" option, in which you can change which instruments play a preset melody. It's vaguely like the Guitar Hero game, except nobody keeps score and you only "play" with a mouse and keyboard.

IWeb offers extra tools to customize Apple's canned designs, plus the ability to add "Web widgets" that pull in data from other sites, such as a Google Map. But in the Web-saturated iLife, it's odd to see iWeb incorporate such modest changes from its predecessor.

Setting aside the quirks of this release, Apple is probably right in thinking that online sharing will matter more than handing out physical copies of your creativity, such as a DVD or a photo print.

It's also far ahead of many people's thinking today, but some of its most ambitious tech forecasts proved right before. Either way, don't be surprised if PC vendors start trying to match iLife's features -- even if still they can't beat its ease of use.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/