This week’s release of iMovie and GarageBand for iPad may well turn out to be a very important moment in consumer software. GarageBand in particular is a simply phenomenal app, going well above and beyond most people’s expectations for a creative/consumer app on a tablet. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. Given that this is, in a way, a 1.0 release (few ideas from GarageBand for the Mac are reused) I wouldn’t hesitate calling it perhaps the most impressive 1.0 I’ve seen… ever.
So, will we see the rest of the iLife suite on iOS? It’s worth mentioning, first of all, that the whole idea of a “suite of apps” may be falling off Apple’s radar very quickly. High-volume, wide-market, affordable and convenient apps make bundles financially unnecessary. Still, we know - and Apple knows - what the idea of iLife is and has been: apps to organize, enhance, and share your digital life. Photos, songs, videos (and, errr, DVDs and websites?)
iOS includes a Photos app. This is a simple viewer app; a session at WWDC once explained how the premise for Photos was to do 2 out of the 3 things iPhoto does: view, edit, and share. That session encouraged developers to do the same with iOS versions of their own apps. This was sage advice in the era of the iPhone 3GS, but with faster, larger, and more familiar iOS devices, Apple won’t continue to encourage this attitude.
So: iPhoto for iOS. What would that mean, given that there’s a Photos app already? Here are some options I can think of:
- iPhoto replaces Photos. (Or, as Dan Wineman suggests, Photos stays Photos but gains iPhoto’s functionality.)
- iPhoto is a separate app. This would introduce some redundancy: do I view my shots in one or the other?
- The functionality of iPhoto is broken up into smaller apps; a separate app to order prints and books, for instance.
- iPhoto for iOS never materializes; its functions are left up to third-party apps.
I find the last option unlikely, especially because iPhoto products are a steady source of profit for Apple. It would be crazy to throw that out in the age of iOS.
The second option - two apps - is the likeliest, I think. iPhoto for iOS may not focus on organizing your photos that much; creation of events, albums, etc. may be skipped. Instead, it could be project-based. What do you want to make: a calendar, a book, a slideshow? And where do you want to put it when you’re done - Flickr, Facebook, on your coffee table, iBooks? My ideas are limited by my looking at iPhoto as it is today; Apple could also choose to do a GarageBand-like rethinking of the whole thing.
As for iDVD and iWeb… Well, been good knowing ya, pals. If you see Sherlock, tell him I said hi.
