Breathing new life into Apple’s iLife
SAYS THAT FOR A WHOLE NEW GENERATION OF DIGITAL MEDIUMS, APPLE SHOULD LOOK AT BRINGING iLIFE BACK TO LIFE
Regular readers might remember a column I wrote quite a while ago (MF #336) in which I lamented that Apple no longer makes new apps to help people engage in the world of new digital media. iMovie made the complex world of digital video simple; iWeb let you build websites via drag and drop; iPhoto brought photo editing to people who’d never even considered the concept. But these days, it’s down to developers on the App Store to fill the gaps of making accessible tools for people to use, which is a shame because a) they don’t have visibility in the way that an offering from Apple would have; and b) they don’t have consistent interfaces between them, which is helpful for going from one to another.
I thought about this again the other day, and I tried to think what a new iLife ’20 suite should include (bearing in mind that iMovie, GarageBand and Photos still exist).
Swift Playgrounds is great, but it’s very much a learning tool, albeit an engaging and accessible one. We need the app equivalent of iWeb (or, if you like, a successor to HyperCard at last), giving people a way to build apps in a WYSIWYG interface. Perhaps it could integrate with Shortcuts, even. There’s a dominant school of thought that teaching people to create apps means teaching them to code, but this is only part of software design. A visual-only tool can teach people to make good interfaces, to build logic, to integrate with external services… and, if I want to make a simple app with basic functions, is it really necessary that I learn coding?
iCast. What’s the modern creative digital medium everyone and their, ahem, ‘porno-writing dad’ is into? Podcasts! A really focused tool to help people record, edit and distribute a podcast would be fantastic – imagine Apple’s skill with machine learning applied to auto-mastering the speech to sound great, and cutting silent parts of the audio automatically. 3) iSend. Newsletters are an internet staple that’s really having a moment right now. A tool that lets you create greatlooking templates, then easily write in them regularly and add images would be ideal for people to keep in touch personally, or to build up a following online that doesn’t require social networks.
4) iStream. Streaming is big business, far beyond the gaming sphere it’s best known for. Artists stream while they work, farmers stream adorable baby animals… anyone can build a following while doing something interesting to others. A streaming app would make it easy to share your Mac or iOS device’s screen, but also would have easy buttons for on-screen graphics, switching cameras, adding effects and other quick tools that make a broadcast interesting. Anyone remember Mac classic software BoinxTV? Like that.
Can you find ways to do these things if you want to? Sure. But the iLife apps felt like Apple inviting us to try new things, and I think we need more of that encouragement.
I tried to think what a new iLife ’20 suite should include…
ABOUT MATT BOLTON
Matt is the editor for Apple and home tech at T3 and has been charting changes at Apple since his student days. He’s sceptical of tech industry hyperbole, but still gets warm and fuzzy on hearing “one more thing”.