Just in case you were wondering, you haven't accidentally slept through iLife '07. Apple has decided that since 2007 is closer to its end than its start, it would skip ahead to iLife '08.

With so much development time going into Leopard, the iPhone and iPods, updates to iLife will probably become a little further apart. Unlike '06, which brought a whole new program in the shape of iWeb, '08 consists of updates and changes to the existing suite.

In fact there's one exception: iMovie '08 is actually a completely new program which feels nothing like previous versions. And there are new technologies and ideas running through many of the updated iApps that are sure to feature heavily in Leopard. The new iLife is certified to work with the new OS on its eventual release.

Universal binary

Every program is universal binary, to work on PowerPCs and Intel Macs, though the system requirements are creeping up as is common with all software. A G4 is the bare minimum, and iMovie '08 requires at least a G5 at 1.9GHz or faster.

The suite requires OS X 10.4.9 or later, as well as QuickTime 7.2. These requirements shouldn't prove problematic for most Mac owners with the possible exception of iMovie which requires a fair amount of grunt.

As always, the faster your Mac and the more RAM you have installed, the smoother your experience will be. Happily the footprint has come down to a reasonable 3GB including all the content and templates, and the price for a single user copy stays at £55 while the family pack creeps up slightly to £69.

Upgrading from the '06 versions of the iLife suite is painless and took just a couple of minutes on our G5 and MacBook. At the time of writing there were already minor updates available for iPhoto and iWeb which fixed some small issues.

It's worth mentioning that iTunes is also a part of iLife and does come on the DVD, but it's so well established and widely used that it's generally thought of as a program in its own right, so let's put it aside for the moment and look at the changes to the major iLife apps.

iPhoto '08

Apple's photo editing software got some significant improvements in '06 and that's also the case here. As you shoot and collect more and more digital photos, you start to run into the problem of large, cluttered photo libraries.