Today marked the historic last Apple-presented keynote at the annual Macworld Convention at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Ever since the company announced its plans to withdraw from future Macworlds, and dropped the news that charismatic CEO Steve Jobs would not even be in attendance, there has been much speculation on what the tone of this last keynote would be like. Apple's Senior VP of Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, took the stage earlier today at noon Eastern Standard Time to announce the latest from the consumer electronics company, and we've rounded up the major highlights after the break.

iLife '09

A good chunk of the keynote was devoted to showcasing updates to the company's iLife software, Apple's signature suite of "digital lifestyle" applications. The new iLife '09 will be shipping at the end of January at a price point of $79 for an individual license and $99 for a family pack. 

iPhoto '09

The first up was iPhoto '09, the photo management component of iLife, which received the following notable updates:

• Faces: with the addition of face detection to iPhoto '09, you can more easily organize your photo library by the people in it. After identifying a person and inputting their name, iPhoto '09 will be able to identify them in the rest of your library. The Faces feature also generates a corkboard-style view of snapshots of the folks in your library.
• Places: the takeaway point here is built-in support for geotagging, so you can organize your photos around where they were taken. Google Maps is also now built in to the application for displaying photo locations. GPS geotagging is increasingly supported by new digital cameras on the market as well as by a number of cameraphones including the iPhone 3G. iPhoto '09 will now take that data and show the latitude, longitude, and even place names like the Eiffel Tower example shown. For photos taken by devices that don't support geotagging built-in, you can also add locations to your photos from within the application. You can browse photos by location using the same interface used in iTunes to browse album artwork or artists (i.e. Cover Flow mode).
• Facebook and Flickr support: Upload directly to Facebook via a new button. Photos you tag on Facebook or Flickr will send the tag data back to sync with iPhoto '09.
• New slideshow themes: with the ability to save slideshows directly to iTunes as well as save as a video files for the iPhone or iPod touch.

iMovie '09

Next up was Apple's movie editing software, which received the following updates in iMovie '09:

• New precision editor: adds a number of editing features including the ability to pull audio from clips whose video you won't be using to overlay the audio track on top of other clips. Also allows you to preview the changes of an edit by allowing a view of the content before and after in the same view, with the ability to adjust particular edits inline.  
• Advanced drag and drop: this adds the ability to create layered movies.
• Video stabilization: this feature takes rendering time to process but should be a very useful feature for a lot of enthusiast and action videographers.
• Dynamic themes
• Animated travel maps: this adds the ability to give shots aged look and the ability to create Indiana Jones-style animated travel maps in both 2D and 3D, showing where you traveled.

GarageBand '09

The music composition component to iLife got updated as well in GarageBand '09, with the major new feature being dubbed "Learn to Play." This new aspect of the application is geared toward actually helping improve your playing skills, with video footage of an instructor and the instrument facing you. Lessons serve as tutors to help you learn to play the instruments, with nine basic guitar and piano lessons built in. Extra lessons are purchasable from built-in Garageband store for $4.99, with lessons from notable performing artists including Norah Jones, John Fogerty, Sting, and Sarah McLachlan available.

 

iWork '09

Apple's productivity suite will see new updates this year as well in iWork '09. Here are the highlights of the new features in Pages, Numbers and Keynote:

Keynote '09

Apple's answer to Microsoft PowerPoint, the live presentation software, Keynote '09 was used to prepare Phil Schiller's presentation at the Expo today. New updates to the software include:

• new tools for creating slide presentations, including new transitions between slides, new text transitions and object transitions, allowing you to zoom in on one particular object in a slide filled with multiple objects.
• new chart styles: including the ability to move charts around in new ways.
• new themes
• Keynote Remote software for iPhone: preview the slide show and control it from your iPhone or iPod touch. Allows you to advance slides by flicking them back or forward in Cover Flow mode, the same mode used in iTunes artist/album browsing. Keynote Remote is available for $0.99 from the App Store.

Pages '09

Apple's word processing application sees the following improvements in Pages '09:

• full screen view: allows you to hide other apps behind your workspace for improved writing focus.
• outlining feature: create documents in regular or outline view and switch back and forth between the outline and the final document. This will be handy for organizing your thoughts before writing to persist as a reference while fleshing out the final version.
• new themes and templates
• mail merge capability: plugs in to tables and lists in Numbers '09.
• MathType and EndNote support: adds integrated support for these third-party apps popular in the scientific community.

Numbers '09

The iWork suite's spreadsheet application was new in 2008, and Schiller says they've made a number of additions for Numbers '09 based on early feedback on the application, including:

• category sort: organize your spreadsheets by different categories.
• more powerful formulas: add support for advanced budget and finance calculations.
• new charts: including new methods of chart linking.

iWork pricing

Priced similarly to the iLife suite and available today, a personal license of iWork '09 will run you $79 or $99 for the family pack which includes 5 licenses. Purchased with a new Mac the price falls to $49, and you can soon pick up a nicely-valued hat trick in the new Mac Box Set that includes Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09 for $169. The Box Set won't be available until the end of this month when iLife '09 is ready.

iwork.com

Also announced as a new feature of the iWork suite is the iwork.com web service, allowing you to share and collaborate on iWork documents with other users. Launching today, iwork.com is officially "in beta" and available for free, although the company plans to eventually bring it out of beta and make it a paid service.

New 17-inch MacBook Pro

Next Schiller unveiled the single hardware refresh of the keynote, an update to the 17-inch MacBook Pro with the following highlights:

• size: 0.98 inches thick and weighing 6.6 pounds
• unibody aluminum construction: brings the MacBook Pro in line with the new construction debuted on the new MacBooks last October
• processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz Dual Core with a 6 MB L2 Cache
• graphics: Integrated nVidia 9400M and 9600M graphics cards
• improved display: reportedly the "best display ever shipped on a MacBook Pro," featuring 1920 x 1200 screen resolution, a 700:1 contrast ratio, LED backlighting, 140 degrees horizontal and 120 degrees vertical viewing angle, and 60% wider color gamut. Available in both glossy (standard) and matte (for an addition $50) finishes.
• new glass trackpad: as used on the new MacBooks
• RAM: up to 8 GB max RAM
• storage: 320 GB hard drive standard with a 256 GB SSD option
• new battery: unfortunately, it's non-removable. Apple says that with the new unibody design, they were able to fit a 40% larger battery in the same space for longer battery life. They are claiming 8 hours on one charge with the integrated graphics (and 7 with the discrete) and that these batteries should have a 5-year or 1000 charge lifespan.

iTunes Plus

Infamous for the "one more thing..." final showstopper announcement at these Expo keynotes, Apple's kicker this year was the announcement that the iTunes Music Store would be going DRM-free. Highlights from the iTunes-related news include:

• DRM-free iTMS: as of today, 8 of the 10 million songs are available without DRM, with the remainder of the tracks ditching the digital rights management by the end of March. Tracks are also reportedly available at higher quality.
• new pricing: a 3-tiered scheme for tracks at $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29 each
• 3G music downloading for the iPhone: the iTunes WiFi Music Store accessible from the iPhone is now simply the same iTunes Music Store accessible from your computer, with high-speed 3G access to the service available from iPhone 3Gs (previously tracks were only downloadable over Wi-Fi).