With Apple’s software, the “i's” have it.

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Apple has software to sell you, including a cool presentation program. But one of the key selling points for a Mac are the apps that it ships with, most especially Apple’s iLife 04 digital media suite: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand. (Apparently the Garage Band team didn’t get the memo about software names.) This is a well-integrated, easy-to-use suite for consumer users that has no real counterpart in the Windows world. Roxio’s Media Creator 7 is the closest approximation.

iPhoto is an album-type program that lets you retrieve pictures from your digital camera, arrange them in folders on your hard drive, and then present thumbnails of them to you for editing and additional use. There are some basic editing capabilities – red eye removal, resize, crop, rotate, a blurring tool for retouching (makes facial wrinkles or blemishes disappear, for example), covert color to black-and-white or sepia.

The big strength of iPhoto is the options it gives users for repacking their files – build slideshows, upload to the Web, get prints, make coffee table books – and it’s integration with iDVD and iMovie. The iDVD connection is self-evident: archive photos or burn the slideshow to DVD. iMovie lets you repackage the photos with a wider range of effects than a slideshow, including what Apple calls the “Ken Burns effect.” That’s the pan and zoom treatment of photographs to give them some movement in a movie that Burns made famous in his PBS documentaries.

iDVD and iMovie are both solid applications in their own right. The main reason for software like iDVD (as opposed to simply including the burning function in iMovie and iPhoto) is building the menus for your DVDs, and Apple’s menu choices have some very cool designs that blend your materials with stock templates. iMovie provides the requisite mix of transition affects, ability to mix in audio files, and blend stills and videos.

iTunes, the music player software that also is the main tool for putting music on Apple iPods, is available for Windows, the rest of the apps are Mac-only. What I wrote about the Windows version of iTunes applies even more so to the Mac incarnation:

An easy-to-use application, with flashy graphics, and clever touches, iTunes has the ability to play and rip CDs, build a music library, tag music files, create playlists, burn CDs, and all the rest. It worked well on my system, without technical glitch. It puts out good sound quality, which is enhanced by nice graphic equalizer software.

Of course, on a Mac, the look and feel of the application is not as unique, as it is standard fare for Apple software. And since it is the native music player on the Mac, Mac users do not have to worry about support for the AAC/MP4 audio file format iTunes prefers.

Garage Band, I have to confess, simply eludes me. I am not sure how software that lets you make your own songs digitally by manipulating pre-recorded sound “loops,” recording the input from your electric guitar, piano, or a microphone, or any combination thereof is a core system application. But I am told by Apple vendors that the software is a big hit companies have been rushing to offer various hardware and software accessories for it.

So go get in touch with your inner Elvis.

Extra Added Attractions

Also included on your Mac is the basic version of QuickTime, which on the Mac is the primary video player. Upgrading to QuickTime Pro, which gets rid of the nag dialog and gives you a number of content-creation and editing capabilities, costs $29.95.

This I find annoying, if not totally ridiculous. You have just paid good money for a Mac. Apple has given you iLife, plus calendar, address book, and mail software, plus the Safari browser, plus the iSync app to tie all of it together. So why is Cupertino being cheesy about QuickTime?

Another extra-cost application ($99.95 per year) is the clever “.Mac” Internet service, which makes uploading content to a web page or doing online backup a simple task because the interface ties in with Mac’s Finder file manager. In this case, the extra cost makes sense. Many users wouldn’t want or need this, and it is a premium service.

Apple has a number of other software offerings, with a heavy focus on multimedia authoring. Final Cut Pro is the flagship for a range that includes Motion (graphics), DVD Studio Pro, Logic Pro (audio production), Shake (effects), and Soundtrack (music). Think of them as iLife after it went to college, got a graduate degree, and went into business.

This range is considered the top choice for video pros who use Macs (and has had the side effect of putting Apple and Adobe Systems at odds, with Adobe rolling out its competing Video Collection for Windows.)

Another big item is the FileMaker Pro 7.0 database (FileMaker is an Apple subsidiary), which has previously been covered here.

But wait, there’s more...

Presentations With Pizzazz

According to Apple users’ lore, the Keynote presentation software ($95) was created because Steve Jobs wanted Mac users to be able to use the same kind of jazzy effects and graphics that he uses in his glitzy Mac conference product announcement speeches.

Let me be candid here: I did not fact check that because it is too good a story to ruin. Even if the tale is apocryphal, the software isn’t. If PowerPoint is the presentation program of choice for the wordsmith or number-cruncher, Keynote would be the favorite of graphic artists and other creative types. It’s not so much a rival to PowerPoint as an alternative to it.

Underscoring that point, Keynote has PowerPoint import-export capabilities built into it. I would guess that quite a few Keynote presentations will first be drafted in PowerPoint because its text editing and outlining features are more familiar than Keynote’s, then jazzed up with the Apple software. (OK, I’m still being candid: that’s how I started a number of Keynote presentations.) Simple rule of thumb here: if you start your slide show from text, begin in PowerPoint; if you pick out side layouts first and then fill in the text, you are an all-Keynote, all-the-time person.

Keynote also is theme-challenged. It comes with only a dozen slide designs while PowerPoint has more than 110. But the gap here isn’t quite that great as almost all of Keynote’s designs are tasteful and usable while PowerPoint ships with a lot of tacky, garish patterns. There is a growing number of Keynote themes available through third-party designers that are priced competitively with like PowerPoint custom themes. A little Goggling will lead to quite a few fairly spectacular looks.

Where Keynote shines is in its ability to fully utilize OS-X’s graphics and 3D engines, and the graphics capabilities of your Mac hardware, to make your presentations look like animated movies rather than simple slide shows. The 3D effects are especially cool. Colors and charts stand out. Keynote also includes a range of shapes and textures for additional impact.

Of course, the more artistic you are, the more you can do with the Keynote by developing additional graphic elements. If you are not a budding da Vinci or Picasso, those third-party themes generally include far more layouts, shapes, and other eye candy than the Apple defaults. Bear in mind, however, that one rule of good presentation is to be sure there isn’t so much stuff going on graphically that you distract the audience from your content (unless, of course, you are going from smoke and mirrors to hide unpalatable data.)

Really, the issue comes down to one of style, audience, and purpose. If you are, for example, an ad agency pitching a new account Keynote is just the tool for showing off your creative wares. On the other hand, if you are the CFO of a Fortune 500 corporation presenting your annual report… well, if you were, you wouldn’t be using a Mac in the first place, but if you did, investors probably would consider a Keynote design wasn’t serious enough.

My theory for small businesses and individuals is this: standing out in a crowd can be an important competitive advantage and Keynote will help you do that with your presentations. But use restraint. Good taste always is in good taste.

(c) 2004 Al Gordon.

In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a principal in the Boston-area strategic consulting firm, Mary Fifield Associates, www.maryfifieldassociates.com

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You can reach Al Gordon at:

al@tnpcnewsletter.com