With iLife ’09, announced at Macworld 2009, Apple brought out some evolutionary new features to their popular suite of “digital lifestyle” applications. Whilst the updates aren’t ground-breaking and earth-shattering, they do add convenient functionality.

iPhoto ’09

One of the biggest upgrades in the suite was to Apple’s photo-management app, iPhoto. In the new version, was Faces, Places, Social Network integration, and upgraded slideshows and print products. The faces feature works well, and is particularly handy. It takes advantage of photo-recognition software to track and find all of the photos of a given person. Places utilizes geotagging, a popular new service built in to cameras and phones to track GPS coordinates of where pictures were taken, to create a map and directory of where all your photos were taken. For me, the feature worked very well. One of the other big new features was the ability to send photos to Flickr and Facebook. While it’s nice to able to send photos to these websites, there’s a lot missing. For starters, you have to add photos to a new set or album, and you can’t add to existing sets/albums. What’s even more frustrating, is that it’s relatively difficult to edit and arrange sets and albums from within iPhoto. It would be nice to see the functionality added soon.

iMovie ’09

After releasing an completely revamped iMovie in late 2007, Apple began to attract public criticisms. I use Final Cut Pro more than iMovie, but I can understand and sympathize with the complaints that were made about iMovie ’08. With the 2009 release, it seems that Apple has cleaned up what’s missing and even thrown in a few new features. For starters, there’s the ability to stabilize video that would otherwise be shaky. I’ve found the new version to be livable, and worth a try if you’re a heavy iMovie user. UPDATE: Thanks to a suggestion, I wanted to clarify some of the more specific features in iMovie ‘09 that are useful. The new drag and drop functionality and timeline editing is much easier. It’s still a big shift from the way video editing has been done, but it’s a huge step up. The precision editor is also a huge upgrade. Even the new themes and effects are slick.

Garageband ’09

The third application to recieve a facelift was Garageband, which now features the ability to learn and take lessons from musicians. In what’s dubbed “Learn to Play” users can either take instrument lessons, or learn popular songs from your favorite musicians.

As noted earlier, iLife brings about evolutionary features, but not revolutionary. If you use iMovie or iPhoto on a daily basis, the upgrade would be worth it. However, if you’re a casual user you might consider holding off. With the release of the new iWork and iLife suites, Apple created the “Mac Bundle Box”, where you can purchase Leopard, iLife, and iWork together at a discounted price. With the imminent release of Snow Leoaprd, promised within the next year, Apple might bundle the new OS with iLife and iWork, in which case you can upgrade at a discounted price. Either way, waiting wouldn’t hurt you. If you’ve got $79 burning a hole in your pocket; go ahead and buy the application suite. It’s a nice upgrade that brings useful features to an already great bundle of Mac programs.