iLife ’08, Apple’s new collection of multimedia software for Mac computers, contains five parts: iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, iWeb and iDVD.

Of these, iMovie has had the most radical changes. The story goes that an Apple programmer found that he couldn’t do what he wanted with the ’06 version, so he rewrote the whole thing from scratch.

The new one is excellent at compiling videos from clips stored on a Mac: the drag-and-drop editing is intuitive and easy. The ‘skimming’ technique, where the mouse pointer is swiped across a thumbnail to view its contents frame by frame, is genuinely innovative and is used in iPhoto ’08, too.

However, there are a few things missing from iMovie ’08 which were available in the previous version. There’s no timeline, for example, only a storyboard view and only a single audio track. You can’t overlap video from one clip with audio from another anymore, either.

iPhoto has also been radically reworked and the introduction of Events makes organising stacks of photos much easier. Events are collections of pictures that are automatically created by the program, as it looks at the dates on which they were taken (it assumes that pictures shot within a day or so of each other should belong to the same event).

Each event is given a thumbnail from the photos it contains for easy identification. Photo editing is more sophisticated than in iPhoto ’06, and there’s better connection with the .Mac site, though a .Mac subscription costs an extra £70 per year.

Garageband increases scope for serious music making, with features like multi-take recordings, and includes the entertaining ability to play along with a virtual band. iWeb gives better control of page design, particularly for photo web pages, and offers links to live Web content. iDVD remains a capable DVD and CD creator, and the new one offers new menu themes and higher quality reproduction.

iLife comes free with new Macs and to use it a pretty up-to-date machine is required. Most of the suite runs OK on a fast Power Mac G4 or better and iMovie requires a 1.9GHz G5 as a minimum, which restricts its use to Macs made in the last few years.

Vista compatible: No (MacOS only)