Apple's iLife 09 Ships Tuesday

Today Apple reported that the new version of iLife heads to retail outlets tomorrow.

The latest version of iLife wowed Macworld attendees at the beginning of the month, with new ways to learn music, organize photos and edit movies bringing much applause from anxious consumers. Tomorrow, Apple releases the highly anticipated productivity suite, offering iLife '09 on every new Mac (on or after January 6) as well as a $79 upgrade for existing users. Additionally, the iLife '09 Family Pack includes five licenses for $99 USD, whereas the Mac Box Set (iLife '09, iWork '09, Mac OS X v10.5.6 Leopard) retails for $169 USD.

As reported during Macworld, GarageBand '09 now features a built-in store that allows users to purchase optional lessons -aka "Learn to Play"- from popular artists for $4.99 each. Top artists such as Sara Bareilles, John Fogerty, Norah Jones and Sting will offer virtual "lessons" in guitar and piano, although the program comes packed with 18 free, basic lessons. iMovie '09 builds upon the original by offering new features such as the Precision Editors, video stabilization, advanced drag and drop, and animated travel maps. iPhoto '09 automatically organizes photos into Events using face detection, face recognition and GPS geo-tagging technologies. Additionally, iWeb '09 offers plenty of new features as well, incorporating YouTube and RSS feeds, a countdown times, iSight video and photos, and FTP publishing integration.

Apple currently hosts more than 70 video tutorials, offering step-by-step demonstrations of the new features unleashed in iLife '09. Apple also said that the new version of iLife requires Mac OS X version 10.5.6 or later, a Macintosh computer with an Intel processor, a PowerPC G5 or 867 MHz or faster PowerPC G4. iLife also requires a minimum 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended), QuickTime 7.5.5 or later, 4GB of hard drive space and a DVD drive.

Last week the Intego Security Alert issued a warning that pirated copies of iWork carried potentially damaging baggage: the "OSX.Trojan.iServices.A" Trojan horse. Although the software is complete and fully functional, iworkServices.pkg silently installs along with the main program unbeknownst to the consumer (the same way Spore installs SecuROM).  

"This software is installed as a startup item (in /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices, a location reserved normally for Apple startup items), where it has read-write-execute permissions for root," reads the alert. "The malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet; this means that a malicious user will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac."

Intego says the consumers should not download the pirated version; at least 20,000 Macs have already downloaded and installed the infected product.