Enough rambling. Since I won’t be here I’m going to make my predicitons and you can read them and then leave a comment telling me how far off I am. That way, I don’t have to go anywhere but here to figure out what happened. If no one comments, I’ll be a sad panda. Though, to prevent this, I instituted a backup plan. Mwhahaha.

So, bold predictions. I’m going to start boldless and get bolder as I go until the end when they’ll be really, really bold. The boldest if you will.

• iPhone OS 3.0 will be available immediately following the keynote and will be free for 3G users, $9.99 for iPod touch and original iPhone owners. It will also be may more awesome than previously thought and include some unannounced features:
  • Way better way to manage apps on the phone. Maybe a better home screen.
  • Some sort of background process allowance. Maybe not for all apps, but for a certain number. These apps will have special permission from Apple. So you will not be able to run iFart in the background.
  • The ability to not have all the default Apple apps on the phone all the time. Contacts, I’m looking at you.
• To coincide with iPhone OS 3.0, the iPhone Nano will be averrable directly following the ‘note. Smaller capacity, cheep, less a lot of features (like GPS). Basically an iPhone for the cheapskates and an economy-friendly model. Also as a means to stifle the price of the:
• 3rd Gen iPhone (perhaps called iPhone Video) to be available sometime in July. This will be the all black super-phone that has been showing up on rumor sites lately and will have the 600 mhz processor and 256 MB RAM and up to 32 GB of hard drive space. It’ll have a way better camera and all that it entails. This will be more expensive than the 3G model, more in line with the original iPhone pricing. May not have a special contract price.
• OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will be heavily demoed and it will be revealed that while most of the stuff is under the hood, a new, unified look across all applications will be implemented — think iLife ‘09. The release date will also be announced as sometime in late August or early September. Price: in the $50 to $75 dollar range. It will also come with a free year of MobileMe or, even bolder prediction, bundled with iLife ‘10 (which would obviously be announced).
• MacBooks will see speed bumps across the board, with the high-end 13″ MacBook turning into a MacBook Pro. The 15″ MacBook Pro will be redesigned ala the 17″ model, and will feature the same built-in 8-hour battery. People will obliviously complain about this.
• One more thing: Steve Jobs will come out and introduce the iTablet/NetBook/small computer that people think they want. It won’t be what people think it will be, but it will be awesome and instantly dominate the market. It won’t be available until late in the summer, presumably with the Snow Leopard release. It will be more expensive than a netbook but less than a MacBook. People will cheer and some will faint. The Apple stock will soar through the roof and fanboys will cry.
• Jobs’ appearance will cause the crush of all fanboy and critic dreams for a few minutes and then they will realize that the wasn’t announced and begin to cry and curse Jobs’ name. Apple stock will then fall citing that the product announcements weren’t good enough. True Apple fans will tell these people to get a life, and Twitter will lag 25 minutes behind all day.

Bold enough for you? These come from a mixture of things I’ve read across the internet over the last few weeks and some from my own crazy head. Namely the later stuff. I won’t really care if I’m completely wrong, though I will be surprised if the new super-iPhone isn’t somewhat accurate. After all, it is time for me to upgrade.

So, how’d I do? Was I right? Wrong? What’d I miss? Let me know below.

Faces
I’ve got to say this was a feature a long time coming. Tagging someone in the keywords of a photo is one thing, but actually tagging their face is another entirely. iPhoto ‘09 allows you to do just that but takes it one better, it uses some sort of facial recognition algorithm to connect pictures based on who is in them. At least that’s the theory.

In actuality, iPhoto seems to detect about 75% of faces. This percentage is very good in my opinion. The system has no trouble at all finding faces in portraits/close ups but in candid or group shots it’s a bit spotty. If the subject is wearing a hat, glasses or even has hair in front of their face sometimes the system doesn’t recognize the face. What iPhoto doesn’t do all that well is figure out who’s in the picture.

Over the last week I’ve gone through the 10 or so years worth of pictures in my library and have tried to tag the faces of most of the pictures in there. This has resulted in nearly 150 different people, each with somewhere from 2 or 3 pictures to a whole lot. On average I’d say each ‘face’ has about 10 to 15 images. Now I don’t know if it’s because there are a lot of different people or not enough source material for each person, but I’d say iPhoto only gets about 25% of the facial recognition correct. I will say that the first person I trained iPhoto to recognize was me (is that conceited or what?) and after tagging 3 or 4 photos, it was able to find a dozen or so more and so on.

In theory the system is awesome and perhaps as I give it more input it’ll get better, but the facial recognition just isn’t quite where I’d hoped it would have been. I’m not sure if the technology behind the recognition is something that could be updated through Software Update, but it’d be interesting to see if Apple improves upon it in the future.

Places Map

Finding locations is pretty easy and there’s a fair amount of default locations built in — all cities and a good amount of landmarks/points of interest. Adding additional locations is just as easy and uses a Google Maps search engine. If that doesn’t find what you’re looking for, you can always just drag the pin where you want it to go.

It’ll be interesting to see how the map grows as I take more pictures with accurate GPS location information, and not just tag with the generic city location.

Location of individual picture.

Online Sharing
Newly integrated into iPhoto is the ability to easily upload and share photos on Facebook and Flickr. It is a very easy process, select photos and pick which service to use. The first time you use each service you have to activate each account — it takes about 30 seconds. Once everything is up and running, sharing the photos is dead simple.

One thing I was interested in was the advertised two-way communication between iPhoto and Facebook with respect to Faces tagging. According to Apple, if you tag a face in iPhoto and upload to Facebook, it’s already tagged. Likewise, if someone tags a photo in Facebook it transmits that to iPhoto. All of this works as advertised except for one feature that you would think would be standard.

When I upload a photo that has been tagged with a face in iPhoto it does tag that photo in Facebook. However, it doesn’t determine if that name is a friend or not so it doesn’t actually link to their account. For example, I tagged a photo of me in iPhoto and when it was uploaded it was tagged but in name only. Couldn’t click on my name to view my profile, etc. It was the same with all the photos I uploaded. If I tagged them in Facebook and re-synced with iPhoto, I was given the “Is this so and so” confirmation. It seems that’s the best way to go about this. Kind of a silly extra step, but one that seems necessary for it all to work properly.

The only other glitch I found here was when I tried to delete a shared album with Flickr. It showed the progress bar, but nothing happened. I quit out and restarted iPhoto and then tried again and it worked — in iPhoto. When I pulled up Flickr the pictures were all still there. I had to delete them using Flickr’s “organize” feature. Again, a strange hassle.

Final Thoughts
So is it worth it? Well, there are some things I was disappointed in, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with iPhoto ‘09. I wish the Faces technology was a bit more refined, but it’s made up for in the Places feature. I’d like to see how future updates and Apple’s infamous “bug fixes” effect iPhoto’s usability. I feel like it’s a good basis to start from and it should continue to grow from here.

iPhoto is a part of iLife ‘09 and sells for $79 (or a little less through Amazon — and I get a small kickback). Over the next few days weeks I’ll go through iLife’s other apps of note, GarageBand and iMovie, and review them as well.

The Dashboard has been a staple of OS X since 10.4 Tiger was released. It’s concept — that you can have different widgets that do different things — has been repeated all over the internet and now in Windows Vista. With the influx of Web 2.0 website offering basically the same functionality, the Dashboard has become outdated and, dare I say, useless. I can’t remember the last time I actually opened the Dashboard willingly — the occasional accidental F12 key strike does the trick — nor actually used a widget. 10.5 Leopard brought a new feature to the Dashboard, the ability to create your own widgets from any website you wanted using a button on Safari. I can safely say, I’ve never used this feature. It’s a good idea, but again, basically useless.

The problem is not the concept, that in and of itself is okay, the problem is usage. It’s a screen that runs in the background and, when pulled up, is ready to go. The problem here is that it sucks up memory causing the entire system to slow. The other problem — and here’s the kicker — is that why would I launch the Dashboard to see what time it is, look at my calendar, check a contact’s email address or see what the weather is when I can simply do that without launching the Dashboard. So maybe part of the problem is the concept after all.

So here’s what I propose: Apple cancel the Dashboard. 10.6 Snow Leopard is set to debut sometime next year and is not actually offering any new features, but rather a promise to slim down the operating system and make it run much more efficiently. Could there be a more perfect time to get rid of something that causes bloat and inefficiency? While people will miss MacWorld, and probably Christmas too, I’m not sure if I know many people who would miss the Dashboard.