Amoungst other important office gear I brought recently (a chilled water machine and coffee machine – essential for the troupes of course) I also bought a new mac. Though instead of actually doing any work on it I’m addicted to it’s bundled application, iLife’09. Well, mainly just iPhoto and GarageBand, but I thought I’d talk about the whole thing since iMovie, iWeb and iDVD are also included in the package should you be interested.

Free as part of any new mac or upgradeable from older iLife’s, iLife’09 is similar to the older package but with some cool new additions. And believe me when I say, you can spend literally HOURS just messing around on it.

Well, we all love photos right? And if you’re as anal as me you’ll love the new feature in iPhoto which allow you to taking your organising to a whole new level! You can add names to a few faces and iPhoto will find all the other pics of that person! It does the same with places too so you can find all the pics you took in a certain place or on a certain holiday with virtual pins in a virtual map! Not only that but it also lets you create themed slide shows and even upload and share you photo’s straight onto Facebook and flickr!

Garageband is next in line as my favourite application in iLife. Even without a music set up, I still jam for ages with myself, playing all the different instruments on the computer keyboard. This time around they’ve introduced basic piano and guitar lessons and even the option to learn how to play some songs by some great artists – taught to you by the artists themselves! I love watching Sting, Ben Folds and Norah Jones show me how it’s done! Genius!

So what else? Well I haven’t really spent much time on iWeb yet, but it looks great for a website novice like me. With a typically macish user friendly interface, you can easily create your new website, integrate your photos, movies and designs into it and put it on the web. It also has a huge range of easily downloadable add ons that inhance it depending on what you want to do. From seo tools through to email marketing software, you can now download these extras straight onto your computer and plug them in. Certainly some of the website and browser tools will attach straight onto the ilife, some of the other software is still free but runs alongside rather than within the ilife.

Maybe I’ll get my kids to show me how it’s done, once I’ve dragged them off iMovie and iDVD!