I watched the video of the Macworld 2009 Keynote. A lot of stuff was much clearer to me. iPhoto and iMovie really look amazing. iMovie has real innovation in it's UI making it easy to do sophisticated video editing.
iPhoto's new features of face detection and labeling and geotagging support is also very impressive. I suspect the idea might have stemmed from their Facebook integration. It's obvious to want to upload photos to the photo sharing sites like flickr and Facebook is more and more popular for this in particular for it's people labeling ability and linking to their social network. Of course Apple made sure they sync the labels. iPhoto also did it one better with auto-face detection and then using that to make it's automatically generated slideshows better by knowing where the faces are. They are very good at making complete use of a new technology.
I hope that there is Address Book integration as well. I'd like to be able to drop a contact from Address Book onto the name field and have it all filled in and linked. The way iPhoto is the central place for all my pictures, I still want Address Book to be the central place for all my contact info. This will be much easier to manage if a name changes to a maiden name. Also, let me set location info by dropping a contact on the place field and using the home address field.
The geotagging is also nice and the map views built in to iPhoto and iMovie make really good use of knowing the location info. These are just fields in the photo file that include latitude and longitude info and the iPhoto demo reminded me yet again of how well Apple leverages technologies it builds into the OS and makes available to all third party apps. iPhoto immediately finds photos of the same people and taken in the same place. I'm sure it's doing this by using spotlight search technology that is keying off metadata fields in the files. This is stuff that was added in Tiger and improved in Leopard. It also obviously uses a lot of Core Animation to make the slideshows and UI as luscious as they are. Yes iLife requires Leopard and won't run on Tiger and that's probably why there is a new bundle that includes Leopard practically for free with iLife and iWork.
I want a bit more though. Locating pictures by location is so good, I want to be able to locate any files by location. If spotlight can deal with arbitrary metadata on any file type, I want to geotag all my files. I want my laptop to have a GPS in it so it knows where it is. Let me find files not just by their name or when I created them (Leopard added built in saved searches for Yesterday, Past Week, etc.) but also where. If I visit a client and take notes, I want the machine to keep track of where I am automatically and give me a central place to see all my location information. Also hook in network location info into it so it keeps track of wifi passwords based on where the machine is. Use location to know what password to use regardless of which network named "linksys" I'm on. When I visit that client again, give me a saved search of "stuff I worked on the last time I was here".
And while we're at it, let me associate contacts with arbitrary files as well. If I send a document to someone via email, let the computer keep track of that for me automatically. When I do a spotlight search for Tia (the name used in the iwork.com demo), let me see all the documents she reviewed; automatically. That would be cool. And I think everything Apple needs to do it is there. They can just build on the capabilities they built in to OS X.
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