Apple: Inside the cult

Your Macworld keynote Schillerstravaganza!

Note: Your humble blogger followed this thing blog-style -- that is, not from San Francisco's Moscone Center, but from his home office, in his pajamas. Good liveblogged resources for the blow-by-blow of the keynote are at Macworld, CNet, the Unofficial Apple Weblog, and Macrumors.

CNet's Tom Krazit says the lines were a little shorter than usual, but the auditorium was packed for Phil Schiller's substitute keynotery at last Apple-attended Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Schiller actually started the keynote with a hint at why Apple is feeling ready to cut itself off from the IDG trade show dedicated to it, pointing out that, with its increasingly omnipresent retail footprint, it gets the equivalent of 100 Macworlds worth of patronage every week.

Schiller made things handy for writers and their bullet points by laying out up front the fact that there would be three new things to talk about. And those are...

• iLife '09, shipping late January. New iPhoto includes facial recognition (FACIAL RECOGNITION!), which will be pretty sweet, if it works. (Phil says it isn't perfect.) The facial recognition thing also can center photos on specific people and build slideshows around them. Also can sort by places, with pics being geotagged -- many cameras will do this automatically now; otherwise you can enter the tags manually. Facebook and Flickr support has also been added ... and this might be enough to get me back to iPhoto, which I have been ignoring more and more as I get further into those two services. iMovie has been updated too -- Schiller acknowledged folks' dissatisfaction with last year's total revamp -- and the engineer who was behind the revamp, Randy Ubillos, was brought out to demo the update (and receive the scorn?). Not being a video guy, I'm not really equipped to assess the new version, but it includes automatic image stabilization, which seems cool. And you can add animated Indiana Jones-style maps, which is cool and entirely gratuitous. GarageBand '09 has also been updated ... the keynote-worth new feature was a mode that actually teaches you how to play an instrument. There are basic lessons from some guy named Tim, and there are also "Artist lessons" from famous people (Sting, Sarah McLachlan, etc.). There's also a GarageBand store from which you can buy $5 lessons from others. (Personally, I would pay $5 to keep Sting off of my monitor, unless it was cool, Police-era Sting.)

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world