iLife is not a single Application, but it is designed to operate together as a single system, so I'm going to give it just one page. I must admit that it is nice that Apple has some semblance of consistency in this department: 5 of the 6 Apps have the dark-gradient-type iT5 theme. However, partially because of this, there are some problems that must be addressed.
The Toolbar. One Last TimeThe UI for all of Apple's iApps suffers from a failure to follow Apple's own guides. The most blatant of these violations is the lack of the use of anything resembling a toolbar. Like what I said over at the TextEdit page (and should have been said for Safari, whose Toolbar isn't quite there either), there are several advantages to having a real toolbar. Apple has traded these major advantages for no obvious good reasons.
For one, it is not that there is not anything that could go in the toolbar: half of the buttons that would have been placed in the toolbar are mysteriously placed at the bottom of the window, or, alternatively, in the middle. More importantly, for firts-time users there is no way to figure out what these buttons do (without clicking on them). For a real toolbar, it could easily be configured to display text labels by default. No such luck in iLife. This problem is exists in the other iApps that use those textured buttons along the bottom of the windows (such as iChat and iCal). iTunes' interface was designed for Mac OS 9, and it appears that Apple just went and copied it to the other iApps.
Webpages 1.0?The most interesting case of the missing toolbar belongs to iWeb… or should I say Webpages 1.0? There was an interesting article in AppleInsider, before iWeb was released, that claimed that iWeb was originally an iWork app called Webpages 1.0, but at the last minute was changed to an iLife app. I think this rumour must be true. First of all, it is different from all of the other iApps in that it has an Inspector. This has been the trademark of Pages and Keynote, so why would it just now appear in iLife? Secondly, look at that pseudo-toolbar: its buttons look very much like the toolbars of Pages and Keynote. In fact, functionally, the only true iLife-esque characteristic in iWeb is the three buttons on the bottom of the window.
I suspected that if this had originally been a iWork application it would have not had those buttons at the bottom of the window, but would have had those buttons in a true toolbar. So I looked in the iWeb package in the Finder, and sure enough, there they were! iWeb has all of the resources of a iWork application, it just lacks a ture toolbar.
Where is iTheatre?iLife currently does not have a video organizer. Back a long time ago, it used to be iTunes that dealt with Music and iPhoto that dealt with Photos. Now that's changed. Now iPhoto is your digital camera interface, and iTunes is your iPod interface. This means that because both iPods and cameras deal with Movies, both iPhoto and iTunes do, but in different and totally insufficient ways. The problem is that iPhoto treats a movie from your camera like a picture and iTunes treats downloaded video like Music tracks.
iPhoto and VideoThere is not really much to say about how iPhoto deals with video, because it really does not. It will bother to put a little video icon on the file, but there is no way to view videos in the iPhoto application. Also, when you are in fullscreen mode and editing, movies do not come up right. Apple has not even bothered to integrate this with iMovie, that is, when you go to edit a Movie instead of a Picture, it would make most sense for iMovie to come up.
iTunes and VideoSecond, the problems with iTunes. You can't resize the video thumbs like you can in iPhoto. Also, just like the Finder, when you have icon view there is tons of wasted space. Moreover, you can't view the videos in the main window. You either have to use a different (child) window or fullscreen. No, I'm not counting the preview pane...either that area is just too small, or it throws iTunes entirely out of proportion (meaning the source list would be incredibly wide and the browse part of the window really tiny). Unfortunately fullscreen just doesn't cut it: there are none of the fullscreen controls like in Quicktime or DVD player.
Plus iTunes has some quirks. For example: set the Preview pane to Selected Song. Double click on a video to start it playing in the Preview pane. Now select another video. That behaviour is NOT right. Another thing is that you cannot select multiple items like you can in iPhoto (I mean by dragging out an area and having the icons in that box be selected). Also, did you also notice that you cannot drag videos into the Videos playlist to add them your library? You can drag them into any category except Videos (and of course Radio and Music Store). But additionally, you can drag videos into categories that don't even make any sense, like Purchased or Podcasts, and while they won't show up in those lists, they'll be imported into the Library. Lastly, they have not even bothered to fix their contextual menus to deal with Movies: the contextual menu for a video file still has a "show song file" option.
I Guess iTunes is made for Windows It is well known that a common problem with dialogue windows in Windows XP and before is that their buttons say "Yes" or "No" on them, requiring the user to read the entire text of the dialogue. Mac OS X, instead, puts verbs on the buttons, so that you can know what your action will be without reading the entire windows (think of "Save" or "Don't Save"). This is one of the reasons that Mac OS X is so much more usable. Unfortunately, it is not perfect. The above dialogue contains the windows-esque "Yes" and "No" instead of the vastly superior verb-like buttons that are traditional in Mac OS X. Nor is this the only place in iTunes such dialogues come up; while not common they do appear every now and again.