Anyone else been finding iLife '04 a little flaky?

[johnnyjibbs]

Ok, I've just come back from my holiday and geology fieldtrip in the US and have been putting my photos into iPhoto, wanting to burn DVD slideshows, etc (have a superdrive).

However, there's a few annoyances. First of all, iPhoto. Now, I think iPhoto 4 is much, much better than version 2 - I like the new transitions, speed, albums, etc, etc. However, some things are a little annoying. Like, when renaming photos and adding comments, why does the text box never stay highlighted? I often have to keep reclicking on the comments box to finish what I'm saying, and sometimes it deletes what I've just written. Worse still, if you press the backspace key and it suddenly unselects/unfocuses the text field, you end up sticking the photo in the trash. So you could quite easily lose some of your photos by accident. This never happened with iPhoto 2.

Secondly, anyone know how to turn off the anti-aliasing of the photos in edit mode? When I view my pictures, they look blurred and it makes me think I wasn't holding the camera steadily enough when taking the shot. Try holding down the zoom button and sliding it towards zoomed in and then back all the way out again. If you hold onto the zoom slider a caveat of OS X means it won't do anything until you let go, including anti-aliasing, so you can view it in its sharpened glory. A tickbox option in the preferences would do nicely (I've sent feedback).

One last thing, I'd love iPhoto to actually rename the filenames, and for them to be recognised in iDVD so that when you "Include photos in DVD-ROM Contents", you get a list of photo names, not filenames.

Now iDVD. Again, version 4 has lots of new features that I wanted (2 hour burning, transitions, more themes, map, autoplay, etc). However, it's unfortunate that the 99 photo slideshow limit is still there. And I have not managed to get iDVD 4 to burn anything correctly yet (I have the latest patch which was supposed to fix that). The slideshows don't background encode, so I have to wait hours for it to do "stage 2: menu and slideshow encoding and multiplexing" before it then automatically and suddenly quits. Another bug report submitted. iDVD 3 burnt correctly for me every single time.

The others I have had few problems with. iMovie 4 sometimes quits, but the latest fix has sorted most problems out. GarageBand is great apart from the performance issues and iTunes is very stable.

EDIT: Although, since I upgraded to iTunes 4.5, some people's shared music on the network is suddenly "incompatible with this version of iTunes" - what's that all about?

Anyone else been having any of my problems, even with the latest fixes? I'm running completely up-to-date software and Panther 10.3.3 on a 1GHz 12" PowerBook G4.

 

[jxyama]

However, there's a few annoyances. First of all, iPhoto. Now, I think iPhoto 4 is much, much better than version 2 - I like the new transitions, speed, albums, etc, etc. However, some things are a little annoying. Like, when renaming photos and adding comments, why does the text box never stay highlighted? I often have to keep reclicking on the comments box to finish what I'm saying, and sometimes it deletes what I've just written. Worse still, if you press the backspace key and it suddenly unselects/unfocuses the text field, you end up sticking the photo in the trash. So you could quite easily lose some of your photos by accident. This never happened with iPhoto 2.

Secondly, anyone know how to turn off the anti-aliasing of the photos in edit mode? When I view my pictures, they look blurred and it makes me think I wasn't holding the camera steadily enough when taking the shot. Try holding down the zoom button and sliding it towards zoomed in and then back all the way out again. If you hold onto the zoom slider a caveat of OS X means it won't do anything until you let go, including anti-aliasing, so you can view it in its sharpened glory. A tickbox option in the preferences would do nicely (I've sent feedback).

One last thing, I'd love iPhoto to actually rename the filenames, and for them to be recognised in iDVD so that when you "Include photos in DVD-ROM Contents", you get a list of photo names, not filenames.

man, you nailed all the iPhoto the annoyances! i got the same stuff happening.

i've noticed erratic text entry field changes during renaming and commenting. i thought it was a problem with my PB!

i also really started to think my photos are in poor quality because all of them look slightly out of focus - even the ones i *know* i took my time to align and give enough time for the camera to focus... i even mildly contemplated getting a new camera... if explained as an anti-aliasing problem, it makes sense.

kind of nice to hear that these are iPhoto problems and not mine. i hope apple will remedy these annoyance in the near future. i really love iPhoto but these annoyances were starting to dent my enthusiasm.

 

[johnnyjibbs]

It's as though Apple is aware of the text field entry problems because prior to iPhoto 4.0.1 it tended to delete sections of text as you wrote while that fix made it tend to use the system beep and not let you type when it went funny. You'd have thought they could have fixed it though.