So iLife 08 appears on Bit Torrent. Do you really think Apple gives a s...?

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So iLife 08 appears on Bit Torrent. Do you really think Apple gives a s...?

Date Created: 11 Aug, 2007, 09:36 PM

I downloaded the iWorks 08 trial the day it became available (last Wednesday in Australia). Like its predecessor, iWorks 06 (sans Numbers) Apple offers a fully working edition for 30 days, by which time you can have won several multi-million dollar contracts using Keynote 08, or delivered a dozen flyers around the neighbourhood announcing your garage sale using Pages. Your choice.

My trial software took about 9 minutes to download (469MB), then a few patients later, I had a break where I could install it. I didn't touch Numbers, but opened a Keynote presentation I want to use next week to see if I could tweak a slide that's been bugging me when I think about it. You can see what I was trying to do below.

(I'm trying to show pilots the importance of visual illusions in understanding Anxiety Disorders, so want to utilise the 2007 Best Visual Illusion Winner.

I start with a single picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, below.

Then, using one of Keynote 08's new builds, move the picture to the right while behind it the exact same picture slides to the left, below. Notice anything different about the angle of lean of the two exact pictures of Pisa?)

I tried to see if iLife 08 was also available to download from Apple but came away crestfallen when I discovered iMovie 08 was Intel or G5 only - no Powerbook G4 compatibility, so back to iMovie HD.

And of course, the download would be humungous wouldn't it, especially with all those Garageband loops. Probably need a DVD install to handle 4GB or so of installable files. Who's gonna download a trial of that?

Well, we all found out a few days later, when iLife 08 disk image files appeared on Bit Torrent sites. Using the excellent XTorrent, I located a couple of images, but stopped short of downloading - 3.68GB is a big hunk of monthly download allowance in anybody's language (click and enlarge the picture at the top of the blog entry)

Let's deal with legality aspects, shall we? Unlike iWork which instituted software registration in 06, iLife still simply loads and installs. No protection, just like your OS X install disks (will this continue in Leopard?)

iLife is not available as trial ware, unlike iWork where Apple encourages its download, and simplifies its purchase via website and email.

So, yep, it would be pilfery to use XTorrent or equivalent to download it. That puts me off for a start, and it would give me no pleasure to deny Apple its USD79. A few years ago I might have said different, and even now I will sometimes be offered by friends their legal copy of software, install it, and if I like it, make my own purchase. If not, it sits there unused, or gets dumped when the need to purge my 80GB hard disk arises. (I do encourage MUG members to seek out those Macupdate bundles of popular shareware at very cheap prices).

Technically, just leaving it there without my own license is a no-no, but we each have to come to terms with how we conduct our lives ethically.

In the case of iLife, what's become obvious to me is that Apple literally gives it away with each new Mac. Compare that to other PC makers where you might get Office bundled, but more likely some cut down piece of crap like Microsoft Works, together with an abysmal amount of unrequired knackered trialware littering the desktop.

iLife is best of breed, enabling an "out of the box and being creative in ten minutes experience" like no other in technology. Even your cellphone can take longer to setup and get working, especially if you want to do anything other than talking. (Screencastsonline has a nice free video of the install and first tinkerings process here).

But notice how much emphasis Jobs gave to Web 2.0 during last week's Keynote announcing new products. It's clear that he took to heart some of the criticisms of .mac, which like the Mini, seems to be the unwanted black sheep of the Apple family.

With .mac, Apple has begun to see its potential as a social software tool, and it's not too late. It missed the boat big time in 2001 when it could have become YouTube because it had all the tools in place. iMovie, iTools, Quicktime, iDisk and homepage construction requiring no knowledge of html. I should know. Before Apple shut me down for an alleged DMCA breach (taking as evidence a falsified document) I had 500 videos on my webpage, viewed by thousands of people all over the world. This is years before YouTube became a phenom, and so irked mainstream media. All it needed to do was enable comments to have a faux YouTube presence.

Apple ought to have seen user generated content and social software coming a mile off, since it invoked the "digital hub" concept in 1998 or so, after Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and the bubble iMac was born. But even though he caught the winds of change late, not including CD burning until the next generation of iMacs, and principally for music, rather than data backup. When Apple, catches up, it recreates whole categories of technology applied to society, as it did with the iPod in 2001.

iLife 08 and iWork are very much linked with Web 2.0, the latter through the ability to share presentations via iTunes, YouTube and iPod. It's not quite cutting edge Web 2.0 yet and just using AJAX to my mind does not a Web 2.0 app make. Interactivity is what counts and it's here that .mac might finally come into its own, offering value eventually for the money. (I'm enjoying my 20GB iDisk and 200GB/mo transfer, 10 times what it was.)

But it does require a critical mass of users out there to share. To that extent, does Apple really care that a USD79 suite which come free and unprotected with each new Mac is tootling around in the Bit Torrent cloud? Let's face it. The more iPhoto 08 and iWeb 08 out there encouraging people to pay for .mac, the better for Apple, no? And moreover, even for those who don't get a .mac account and upload to their own servers, somewhere the "made with a Mac" logo will appear. This is viral branding, with many new users probably quite proud to associate themselves with the cool brand of Apple (who coulda thunk that 10 years ago?).

I said in a blog article a month ago, in predicting an event like last Tuesday, that an Apple tsunami is building. Such things begin with tectonic plates rubbing each other as they move on the earth's surface. It will require one more event in 2007 for thre to be enough energy to cause more than a few superficial ripples (witness all the chat lately about Apple in the enterprise setting - they're rumbles portending big changes ahead).

The final element to lodge into place will be Leopard in eight weeks. My intuition tells me we're being lulled into a "hmm.. looks a bit like Vista, doesn't it?" daze, especially by Windows apologists (noticing the new Leopard desktop background, below).

I suspect we're going to be quite surprised by Leopard, and the tight integration of iLife/iWork/iPhone/.mac. Will each get a point update after Leopard hits the storeshelves? You bet!

Those who dislike life in the Apple silo will have to trudge away on principle, knowing they've chosen to miss out on outstanding technologies, and dare I say paradigm shifts? Their loss, Apple's gain. Sit back and enjoy the show.