Is iLife '11 really that bad?

[Jack Neill]

iLife was a major draw for me to the Apple ecosystem around 2008. I was broke at the time and my only OS X machines were Hackintoshed Intel boxes. I fell in love with iPhoto, it was so good at organizing my family photos. I eventually began my real Mac collection and continue to love Apple but those 10.4-10.6 days had me head over heels. Nothing felt better than loading up iTunes on my G4 iBook (my first real mac) and playing some Coldplay.

 

[retta283]

Well, my response to this thread.

iPhoto '11 was never as good for mass dump/view/edit of photos as '09 and especially '08 were. Updates in 2011 and 2012 did improve things greatly, but it still was an inferior product. Such things as when it was released there was no way to view a photo fullscreen without controls/editing interface, they later changed it so the interface disappears after about 5 seconds but there is no way to purely view a photo fullscreen without QuickLook or Preview which is a PITA when your photos are enclosed in the library. I'm not willing to wait 5 seconds in the middle of a skim to examine a photo at the proper size. When you have hundreds of photos this is a waste. On small displays this is especially important. The fact the photo shrinks while editing is also horrid, before the controls were floating elements, much better and you can place them anywhere. In the age of the widescreen, most photos are not filling your display and so these tools should not be obscuring your photo.

There's more but that was the one that most instantly stuck out to me. Stability was so-so, improving with time, but never got back to '08 level. '09 was generally fine, but often paused for upwards of 25 seconds to load the Faces feature for my library, even with an i7 and 8GB RAM. Once this was done loading, it was fine. '08 was slick and stable. The 2015 Photos app has fixed some of these things, but also removed and ruined others. I haven't used Photos since Sierra so I can't say what it's like now. Aperture is still missed.

iLife was a massive factor in my love for the Mac, great apps that were intuitive and fun to use. The whole system felt that way at the time. It really felt like something more than just a piece of software and hardware, the way it all came together was excellent. This is something really missing these days. The soul of the OS just seems to have fled.

 

[dandeco]

iLife '11 was one of my favorite versions of the suite I ever used. It's what I used when I got my first Intel Mac in 2011 (a 2009 polycarbonate white MacBook). I still have it set up on the early 2006 17" Core Duo iMac in my collection of operational older Macs.

Of course, iPhoto was my most used iLife application during its' time. I found the adding of "events" a very handy feature in iPhoto '08, because you now also had "events" for groups of photos, that way you didn't have to make an album for everything. WAY more convenient. The editing features were also nice, but they do pale in comparison to the more extensive image editing features in Photos for MacOS (I've often referred it to as the successor to iPhoto.)

iMovie '11 got some really spiffy and useful updates after it was completely rewritten and redesigned three years before. It came with the cool Movie Trailer creator, brought back "rubberband"-style audio editing and waveforms and added other useful sound editing tools and effects, one-step video effects, a face recognition feature like the one in iPhoto, and even the ability to work with something like a classic timeline (the current iMovie strictly sticks with said classic timeline-esque layout.) I even used it to make several YouTube Poops from 2011 to 2013, before I began to mostly stick with Final Cut Pro X for making them.

I've also used GarageBand '11 for quite a few "Stupid Statement Dance Mixes" for said YouTube Poops, and it would get the job done for me pretty well. And despite not being updated at all, iDVD was also great to still have, since I'd still burn older family home movies to DVD at times, and it has such nice elegant DVD menus and navigation.

It amazes me how much iLife has fallen apart; we now only have iMovie and GarageBand, while iPhoto has since been replaced with Photos (bundled into Mac OS, as I already mentioned.)