One of the most anticipated additions to iLife ’09 and iPhoto ’09 is the Face-recognition feature that identifies within your photo library pictures of the same people and gives you the opportunity to quickly identify and locate pictures of friends and family. This innovative concept seems adapted from the facebook idea of ‘tagging’ people in photos, but Apple has taken it one step further with the face recognition program that can search your database and find pictures without you having to locate and ‘tag’ every photo.

This application takes some getting used to and some set up time. When you first open Faces, you must go through and identify people individually in your photos. This can be an arduous process, but after tagging a person in 20 or so photos, iPhoto will composite a selection of photos for you to choose from that confirm that the person you are selecting is in those pictures as well. The program can recognize pictures where people have aged (sometimes within a ten year span, more if you vary the pictures that you select of that person) and then stores the person and their list of photos on a ‘corkboard’ that you can access and scroll through to locate certain individuals. Faces will even try to locate faces in a video from your digital camera.

This creative new program is not without its drawbacks. Macworld says, “The Faces training system could be a bit more straightforward, and it’s not as automatic as you’d expect. For example, we were hoping for some sort of batch-training mode, but you have to spend quite a bit of time manually confirming or rejecting each suspected match. You need to enter a collection of a person’s photos to get iPhoto started, then click Confirm Name and hope that there are some good candidate photos for you to train.”

What do you think of iLife ’09 and its Faces program? Let us know in the comments section.

Fortunately, if you haven’t been following along, you can get up to speed fairly quickly with the Apple .Mac To MobileMe Transition FAQ on Apple’s website. This document should answer most of your upgrade questions if you’re a current user.

Bottom line — if you’re currently a .Mac user, you get the service upgrade without having to do anything. A couple of other decent items to note:

• Your .Mac subscription will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe at no additional cost.
• Individual subscription storage doubles from 10GB to 20GB.
• You may continue to use your current mac.com email address to send and receive email just as you do today. If you have any email aliases at mac.com, they will also continue to work.
• All of your existing iDisk files will be available on MobileMe iDisk.

And a couple of things you should be aware of

• As part of this transition to MobileMe, some features are being discontinued: Web access to bookmarks (bookmark sync between your Macs and/or PCs is still supported), iCards, .Mac slides, and support for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther sync.
• iPhone users: You will need to update to software version 2.0 or later to enable push mail, push contacts, push calendar, and push bookmarks. This software update will be available when MobileMe launches.

All this and much more at the Apple .Mac To MobileMe Transition FAQ on Apple’s website.

I am the editor that suggested that Apple would delay release of the new iMac until after Leopard was released. I also suggested that the brushed aluminum look was being phased out. It appears I was dead wrong on both counts.

The new iMac supports an upgraded intel chipset (Santa Rosa -based) as well as a higher maximum RAM capacity. The new machine boasts a quasi-retro brushed aluminum look with an exceptionally glossy display. There has been plenty of talk that the new display is too glossy, but we disagree: It is stunningly beautiful.

To get a better idea of what most folks would be buying, we decided to get a machine more closely aligned with most of our readers budgets. So, we set a price ceiling of $2,150 to purchase a new iMac, and test it. We opted for the 2.4 GHz machine with 2GB of 667MHz RAM. The smallest HD a consumer can buy these days is a whopping 320GB SATA HD! Needless to say, we didn’t feel like we were buying a budget machine, even though we purchased toward the lower end of he 24″ iMac spectrum.

The performance of the machine has been phenomenal. As I write this review, I’m running Parallels 3.0 with Ubuntu Linux running full force! The amount of computational power this machine packs is truly amazing.

Anyways, Here are a few of the pictures you’ve been salivating over:

As it appeared, out of the shipping box:

As it appeard, in it’s own box:

Opening the first layer …..

The box that the new keyboard comes in (yes, the rumors ARE true)

The new Apple Keyboard. It’s thinner than some of the hairs of this editor! All of the rumors have been proved true. It has also become amazingly apparent, that the Mighty Mouse is due for an upgrade. Perhaps this might come after the new OS release in October?

The new Apple Keyboard alongside the same old Mighty Mouse and Remote Control. With the sleek new look of the iMac and Apple Keyboard, it’s puzzling why Apple didn’t release a new Mouse and Remote Control simultaneously. One is only left to speculate that the Gods from Cupertino have deemed it necessary to delay our gratification a while longer.

Perhaps recent talk of Apple mouse patents are a sign of things to come?

Finally, the machine itself …

And there it is ladies and gentlemen: What all of us have been waiting so long for! Note that though the picture makes the iMac appear to be white, it is not. Our new machine is pictured above next to a 22″ widescreen Samsung monitor. It appears on this editor’s minimalistic desk. I’m a true believer of “paper-less society”.

The new iMac is a treasure for this editor to use. The above picture shows it with an additional monitor plugged into it. Apple dropped it’s price point for the iMac in conjunction with the new model’s release. It’s a curious move, though Apple has shown time and time again it’s penchant for bewildering business strategy.

Speaking of business strategy, it’s been noted that many enterprise businesses are starting to look towards iMacs to meet their goals. The release of Numbers (Apple’s Excel), has seriously furthered that effort. Perhaps we could expect many of the super-lame, modular wall office complexes to start sporting new iMacs? It’s a stretch, for sure. But you just never know!

Engadget and several other sites are reporting a possible first glimpse of the new keyboard which is to accompany the rumored new iMac computers. This first glimpse follows the path of previous rumors and lends some credence to the idea that the new iMacs will feature a brushed aluminum finish. A word of warning however, as the picture does have “Photoshop” embedded in the exif data. This picture would be easy enough to fake.

(Via Engadget.)

Now, our side of the story.

It seems unlikely that any new machine will be released that closely before the new OS, 10.5, is made public. More likely, is that the new iMac will be released concurrently with Leopard in October. The public relations of releasing a new computer to people, then making their software outdated within 6 weeks makes the August date seem inaccurate.

In regards to the new brushed aluminum shell to the new iMac, that’s a source of debate here at Tweak. There are some of us that believe that a brushed aluminum shell makes sense, since that’s what the new Mac Book Pros, Mac Pros, and Cinema Displays all have. However, the new OS, Leopard, will discontinue the brushed aluminum look for finder, and any other displays. That leads some of us to believe that the brushed aluminum look is on the way out for Apple. The new iPhone appearance, seems to confirm this idea.

In short, don’t buy a new iMac until the new machine is released. It should be soon, since a new version of iMac hasn’t come out in a long time.