The most commonly asked question I get from my friends and coworkers goes like this: “I (or maybe my kids) am/are tempted to buy a Macintosh but I am concerned that doing so will leave our home with a computer that won’t handle work from the office.”
Newspaper writers work closely with photographers and graphic artists and find Macs particularly intriguing because these, the most creative of our colleagues, remain adamant about their Apples even as we word jockeys learn to relish the productivity gains Microsoft Windows bring to our side of the business.
So I get asked the question as old as the computer revolution: “Mac or PC?”
The best answer I can give these folks is “keep your eye on the ball, your shoulder to the wheel, your ear to the ground and your back to the wall. Now try having some fun in that position.”
When it comes to having fun with a personal computer, the newest Macs rule the desktop–and the laptop. Call it the facts of iLife.
Over the past month, Apple’s new home-oriented iLife ’04 digital entertainment software has been delivering eye-popping, ear-warming, near no-brainer digital delights to the Mac minority.
The 2004 version of iLife delivers an amazingly seamless system. It integrates downloading music from Apple’s iMusic store, playing songs on the computer with iTunes, storing and printing digital photos with iPhoto, creating quality home movies with iMovie and now recording one’s own musical performances with iLife’s latest component, GarageBand.
Apple has created a suite of personal entertainment software for the Mac just as Microsoft developed the suite of business strength work tools (Word, Excel and PowerPoint, known as Microsoft Office) in versions for Macs and PCs.
Before Mac partisans once again start calling for my head for calling iLife a no-brainer, let me emphasize that the whole point of the newest Macs is to reduce, and sometimes even remove, the time-consuming thought required to use a computer for home entertainment.
For Windows wonks like this writer, iLife ’04 seems almost too easy because it takes all of the different multimedia things we have learned to do with various PC programs and integrates them all into a single package where each iLife module collaborates with the others.
When you plug a digital camera into your Mac, for example, the machine automatically downloads all of its images into iPhoto, Mac’s photo-storing and slide-show module.
When you link to the iMusic store and download music, it is saved in Apple’s proprietary iTunes software that handles playback and playlist making. It also synchronizes with Apple’s iPod portable music player.
When you want to create a slideshow using iPhoto, Macs use iTunes as the source of the background music.
The integration continues with iMovie and iDVD, the Mac-only software that uses Apple’s proprietary SuperDrive DVD burners to make professional-style discs of home videos.
When you plug your digital camcorder into a Mac, iMovie pops up with probably the best consumer-level video editing software ever made. As the videos are downloaded, they are converted into clips that can be added together, trimmed and moved around at will. When you need photographs to augment a home video, iMovie links with iPhoto to get them. When you want to add a sound track, iMovie accesses iTunes.
Contrast this with the PC experience where we must acquire separate programs for music, music listening, music downloading, photo storing and movie and DVD burning.
With iLife, these functions are joined at the hip.
And now iLife ’04 introduces GarageBand, a very impressive multitrack music-recording program that uses the computing horsepower of new Macs to handle all of the sound sampling, simulated instruments, track looping and other functions of expensive keyboards and studio mixer boards.
Because it is so new and complicated, GarageBand brings unfamiliar heavy lifting to the Mac experience.
New users of GarageBand need to learn fundamentals like how to find the music loops that are the heart of multitrack composition. They must learn as well about transposing octaves, altering tempos and other basics. There are limited tutorials under the help menu and other advice at Apple’s Web site (www.Apple.com/ilife).
You start by dragging and dropping prerecorded sound bites called loops onto a time line. You stack the drums on top of the strings, and the strings on top of the pianos and so on.
Each of these instrument loops was recorded by professionals. Icons for individual loops may be expanded to fill as many bars as needed, and you put them together by dragging clips along the timeline.
Then, when you plug a $100 MIDI keyboard into a Mac’s USB port or use a USB adapter for an electric guitar or a microphone for singing, the GarageBand software turns to ear candy.
At that point, it’s your own skill that makes the music come alive, but the experience of digitally dressing up one’s own performance can only be described as a thing of beauty and a joy.
And that is one of the facts of iLife.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail jcoates1@aol.com. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611areJames Coates
