The Globe and Mail

What Apple's iWork is to work, iLife is to family computing, and that activity has come to mean multimedia: music, photography, movies and file sharing. So iLife has become a suite with five programs: iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand.

The suite — which comes pre-installed on the new iMac computers — is heavily integrated with two major Apple success stories: iTunes (and its hardware partner, the iPod), and the .Mac online sharing and storage system. The whole package has been so intertwined as to be almost seamless; Apple is making certain that just about every one of iLife's features will end with the user eventually going to iTunes or creating an account with .Mac.

• The Good:

  a complete suite of lightweight multimedia programs to handle music, photography, movies and file sharing. It comes free with the new iMac computers, and is very easy on the pocketbook for other Mac users.

• The Bad:

  You can bump into the suite's limitations in short order, meaning you might want to upgrade individual programs soon. The whole package pushes hard for users to sign up for space on the .Mac system and to use iTunes; it's less friendly for other music purchasing systems.

• The Verdict:

  A good introduction to the basics of music, photo and film editing, putting the final results on DVD and on a website.
• 
  

It is not as coercive as this sounds, but it's not much different from the kind of smothering embrace used by Microsoft that so distressed Apple devotees for years. Perhaps the market has simply become more cynical, and now accepts this attitude as inevitable.

The application being pushed hardest by Apple is iPhoto, which is primarily an upgrade to its previous versions. It organizes photos by "Events," meaning it will pre-organize pictures imported from a camera by date, with an offer for the user to fill in other pertinent details. This is nice, but it does not solve the problem of having to sort pictures further; a photo card with pictures from both Uncle Brian's birthday party and a daughter's graduation will be seen by iPhoto as a single "event" simply because the pictures were on the same card and downloaded together.

Now, iPhoto makes it easier for users to upload their pictures to their .Mac accounts, which can get expensive, mainly since they have been expanded to 10 gigabytes in size. The concept here is to make it really easy to upload pictures from the iPhone and export finished galleries to the Web, using the included iWeb page-creation tool, or share them on .Mac.

The iMovie application is designed as a simpler version of Apple's own Final Cut Express, which is in turn a simpler version of Final Cut Pro, the industrial-strength film-editing tool. Completely redesigned from the ground up, iMovie is being regarded by cynics as a "dumbed-down" version of Final Cut, but it has nevertheless been stuffed with easy mechanisms to export films to iTunes, to other Mac computers, to iPods, to Apple TV or to iPhones, as well as exporting them to a Web gallery (through iWeb again), or to YouTube.

And iWeb has also added some new features: The ability to add live Web widgets, mostly snippets from Web 2.0 sources, on Web pages, on the .Mac system. It also supports cascading style sheets, which give websites a coherent design theme, allowing users to switch themes on the fly.

And of course entertainment produced by iPhoto and iMovie can be captured to DVD disc via iDVD, whose major upgrades are under the hood: improved performance and better quality in recording.