iPhoto ‘09 - Overview

I have to say, I’m very impressed with iPhoto ‘09.

“Faces” has been added to iPhoto as a way to organize and tag your photos. Once you’ve started assigning names to photos, it automatically “recognizes” photos with those other people, and labels them accordingly. Facial recognition is something I’ve seen in other software, but to see it added into iLife/iPhoto is nice.

When you have a new photo or an unidentified photo, it pops up a “corkboard” that shows the faces for people you’ve already named and suggests matches for the new/unidentified photo.

“Places” has also been added as a way to organize and tag your photos. While they emphasized the geotag aspects (GPS coordinates added to a photo’s EXIF information by your camera), it’s also handy to manually do it, and it plots out your photos on maps.

They’ve also added a “Travel Books” feature where you can have books printed out with maps and photos of the places you visited or are interested.

Both of these features could end up being very useful to genealogists in the long run. I have my doubts about how accurate the facial recognition will be when it comes to older or smaller photos, but even if you have to do some manually, it seems like a good way to keep track of everything.

Macworld 2009 Starting Up

Macworld 2009 has started, and the Phil Schliller’s keynote is set to start at 9am PST, 12pm EST. This will be Apple’s last Macworld appearance, at least in a keynote capacity.

Live Feeds:
MacRumors thread was hacked somehow.
http://live.gizmodo.com/

MacRumors MacWorld 2009 Rumor Roundup

Rumored Products/Updates:
* iLife and iWork 2009, with possible online components
* New Mac mini, iMac, and possibly Mac Pro models
* New 17″ MacBook Pro
* OS X 10.6 Release Information
* New iPhone
* Some kind of media/home server

MacFamilyTree 5.3.7, Sale on MacFamilyTree, MobileFamilyTree (Dec 24 -25)

Today, MacFamilyTree version 5.3.7 was released.

Coinciding with the holidays, Synium Software is also offering a substantial discount on MacFamilyTree and the iPhone/iPod touch version - MobileFamilyTree, including MacFamilyTree upgrades from previous versions.

MobileFamilyTree syncs up with MacFamilyTree and allows you to carry much of your MacFamilyTree data on your iPhone or iPod touch.

MobileFamilyTree requires at least MacFamilyTree 5.2.3.

Sale prices/details:

MacFamilyTree: $34.30 USD (Regular Price 49 USD)
Upgrade from an older version: $14.50 USD (Regular Price 29 USD)
Coupon Code MFTXMAS08:

MobileFamilyTree: 2.99 USD (Regular Price 4.99 USD)
Coupon Code XMAS08:

Full Changes in MacFamilyTree 5.3.7:
* Full english user guide added
* Fixes and many performance enhancements in the Virtual Tree
* Minor bug fixes and other minor improvements

As with all 5.x updates, this update is free for MacFamilyTree 5 owners.

Download/Buy: Synium

Site update - Dec 24th

I’ll be doing several updates in the next few days, so you may see some downtime. In the last month we’ve had several stories that we weren’t able to publish due to some issues that have been corrected, so you may see several stories pop up that appear to be older.

Keith Wilson Passed Away (iFamily Developer)

Several people have written to inform us that Keith Wilson, developer of iFamily for Tiger and iFamily for Leopard, a respected genealogy program in the Mac community, has passed away from a heart attack. Keith was 65 years old.

Our condolences go out to his family.

Dick Eastman has a writeup on Keith.

Keith’s website: iFamilyForLeopard.com/

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