Apple is getting ready for the launch of ‘Snow Leopard’, the latest big update to its OS X operating system (the Mac alternative to Microsoft Windows), but it has also been busy with some of its other software products recently.

All Macs are sold with Apple’s iLife suite installed, but the collection, which includes applications such as iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband, is also updated every year. The new ’09 edition brings some impressive new features to those programs.

We weren’t big fans of the ’08 version of the iMovie video-editor, but iMovie ’09 is a definite improvement. One of the most useful new options is the advanced-drag-and-drop feature. When you select a video clip with the mouse it can be dropped on top of another clip and a menu will appear that enables the user to quickly combine the two in a number of ways.

One would be to simply replace the first clip with the second, or the second clip could be inserted into the middle of the first, or superimposed on top of the first clip to create a picture-in-picture effect. There’s also a new Precision Editor that allows users to fine-tune the transitions between clips more accurately than before.

The iPhoto photo-organiser gets a big upgrade too. The big improvement here is the Faces option, which uses face-recognition technology to identify people in your photos. Just select a photo of a particular person and click the Name button to add their name to that photo.

The program will then scan your entire collection of photos to see if it can find other pictures of the same person and then it will group them together automatically. There’s also a Places option that allows GPS location data to be added to photos which can then be linked to a map. User can then browse photos by region by clicking on the map.

The Garageband music software has been given a more modest upgrade, although it does now include some very slick guitar and piano lessons for beginners.

We can recommend iLife ’09 to any Mac user who already uses iPhoto and iMovie to organise photos or videos.