Apple rolled out the latest version of its iLife, iWork, and .Mac offerings on Tuesday during a special media event at its company headquarters.

Web integration was the theme for much of the new software. Users with .mac accounts will now be able to use the iPhoto and iMovie applications to upload files directly into online galleries to share with other users.

To support the new gallery features, Apple will boost the amount of storage afforded to .mac subscribers to 10GB.

The applications themselves have also been upgraded. The new version of iPhoto will feature an 'event' cataloging system that automatically groups photos shot on the same day as a single album. The aim, said Jobs, is to reduce clutter as home users build increasingly larger digital photo collections.

"Instead of looking through 5,000 photos, you're looking through 50 events," he explained. "And that makes having 5,000 or 10,000 photos manageable again."

Other iLife upgrades include a higher resolution exporting feature that Apple says is only "slightly lower" than HD, as well as a new editing interface.

Jobs also demonstrated a new feature in Garage Band that lets users visually mix songs by adding or removing instruments from a pre-recorded track.

However, the event wasn't all play for Apple. Jobs also announced new features for iWork, the company's office utility suite.

Pages, Apple's word processing and page design application, will now feature a separate mode exclusively for word processing, as well as a format bar similar to the one in the current version of Microsoft Word.

Jobs also rolled out Numbers, a spreadsheet application in the style of Excel. In addition to the spreadsheet and graphing functions, Numbers also features a number of pre-designed templates for presenting data and a side window showing the results of commonly used formulas, such as sum and average, for each column.

Michael Gartenberg, analyst and vice president for Jupiter Research, said that the timing for numbers couldn't be better: Microsoft revealed last week that it would be delaying the Mac version of Office, leaving the door open for iWork.

"They are probably going to pick up a lot of potential Microsoft Office customers in the fall and during back-to-school," he told vnunet.com.

"A lot of people who may have bought Office for the Mac will now go with iWork."