Well, coming out of Apples Keynote we got a few three new updates. Watching the live updates sure wasn’t the same as watching the stream. While watching the stream I’ve actually become pretty excited about the new update. Why am I excited? Well I’ll tell yah all about the new features.

iPhoto

Probably the app that Phil spent the most time on and certainly quite worthy of it. Last year Apple introduced a new organizational tool called “Events”, where it basically separated your photos based on the time taken into different categories or albums. Pretty neat and works rather well. Now Apple is introducing the next step in photo organization, Faces and Places (cute how they rhyme isn’t it?).

iPhoto now uses Facial Recognition technologies to both find the faces of people in photos and then attach an ID to them. From the demo it seemed to work surprisingly well and may come in handy if you have lots of different people in your iPhoto Library. The next thing introduced was Places which basically took geotagged photos and linked them to a map within iPhoto. Cameras now days have GPS built in so this will be very usefull for world travellers, and even if you don’t have GPS you can tag the photos yourself. Among other updates to iPhoto, there is added Facebook and Flickr support, new slideshow themes and finally some updates to the Photo Album service. All in all, it’s a healthy update and is really making iPhoto stand out even more on the Mac [Milind: And keep its position as the best photo manager now with competition from Google's Picasa].

iMovie

Last years update took the old iMovie ’06 and completely re-wrote it. Sure it looked cool but with the lack of a timeline and some advanced features, it wasn’t well received. Eventually Apple decided to offer iMovie ’06 as a download for those who still prefer the old way of doing it. With iMovie ’09, Apple is still keeping the same fundamentals from ’08 but they are appealing to the more advanced and borderline pro users.

So what’s new? Well, Apple has added “Advanced Drag and Drop” which lets you basically take one clip and insert it into another clip using a nifty new pop up menu. This new menu allows you to do several advanced things from just inserting the audio to cutaways, picture-in-picture, and green screen effects. Along with the Drag and Drop, iMovie ’09 also introduces a much needed precision editor. You can basically use this to fine tune your edits and even do this with the audio or video independently. Keeping in theme with the iPhoto update, iMovie also has a Dynamic Themes which auto fills your movie with themed titles, music and transitions. A few other notable additions is the Animated Travel Maps, so now you to can make Indiana Jones style transitions to show the places you’ve been. There is also video stabilization and a whole whack of new titles and transitions. This may be just what Apple needed to find the common ground between the amatuer and the pro editors.

GarageBand

GarageBand’s most notable update last year was the inclusion of GarageBand Jam. This let you assign instruments and styles to guitars, basses, piano and other instruments. This year, GarageBand now includes lessons for teach consumers how to play the Piano and Guitar. Included with GarageBand is 9 lessons for both and for when you feel more advanced you can get Artist Lessons. Apple has managed to get several big names like Sting, John Fogerty, Norah Jones and a few others to create a set of video lessons on how to play a basic version a particular artists song. Of course these lessons will cost you some money but it may be worth a watch at least so you can hear the background story of the song. Something not mentioned but many hardcore users of GarageBand will probably like is some new Guitar features that let you recreate sounds using amps and stompbox effects in the app.

iWeb and iDVD

It sure doesn’t appear that there is much to say about these two apps. iWeb ’09 has Facebook support, so now you can let your friends know when you’ve updated your site. Asside from some possible new themes in iWeb, there isn’t much else to say even for iDVD [Milind: It is obvious that Apple wants to phase out iDVD and along with it, the optical drive].

Update: iWeb can now upload to any FTP web server. This suddenly puts iWeb back in the game! (Thanks MacDuff!)

In conclusion, it seems as though iMovie is probably the biggest selling point for this $79 bundle and will certainly get the attention of the pro’s again. The big question though is if it’s all worth it, and unlike iWork ’09 you can’t get a free trial. So your probably best just to wait for the reviews before you want to upgrade. From the looks of it though, it may be worthwhile. For more info, screenshots and some videos, visit Apple.com/iLife.