Can I wait to upgrade iLife & iWork?

I'm quite eager to try the new iLife '09, especially the Faces feature of iPhoto.  I think I'll also enjoy using the Places feature, and the Facebook & Flickr integration.  If I ever get time to use it, iMovie '09 also sounds like a big improvement.  And I'd like to play with the "learn to play piano" feature of GarageBand.  I don't use iWork often, but I've paid for the previous version and I expect it's worth upgrading.

But ironically the "Mac Box Set" may keep me from upgrading.  Or I suppose more accurately, the lack of an iLife/iWork bundle may keep me from upgrading.  iLife '09 costs $79, as does iWork '09.  (There's no discount for people who have previously purchased iLife '08 or iWork '08.)  The "Mac Box Set" is a bundle of iLife '09, iWork '09, and Mac OS X 10.5.6  Leopard, for $169.  But the new MacBook Pro I got in August came with Leopard, and I've already bought Leopard for my old PowerBook G4.  So that bundle doesn't save me any money.  But knowing the bundle exists makes me think I should wait for when Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) is released (probably this summer) and buy the inevitable update of the "Mac Box Set" then.

Ah! Room to stretch

For some time now I've been just about completely out of space on my 17" PowerBook G4's 100 GB (93.04 GB capacity) hard disk. (My PowerBook has become my primary machine both at home and at work.)

Most days after I open iTunes and it downloads new podcasts and episodes of TheA Daily Show, I'm down to less than 2 or even 1 GB of available storage. The largest fraction of my hard drive is taken up my my Music folder (over 42 GB) and almost all of that is from iTunes, so I've been focusing on that. More often than I'd rather, I've been sorting the folders in my iTunes Music folder by size and copying the contents of the largest ones (the largest is usually almost always the Podcasts folder) to an external backup drive and then deleting stuff in iTunes. I can usually free up a gig or two, but that gets eaten up again in a couple days.

It occurred to me recently that my Pictures folder is also quite large, and most of that is taken up by my iPhoto Library. This morning I finally made time to backup the library (which is probably unnecessary since I'm already using Time Machine--but one can never have too many backups) and then create smart albums for all my unrated photos from 2005 and 2006. (Photos from 2004 and previous were kept in separate iPhoto libraries which I keep on several different external drives.) I then exported them to my external drive (for yet one more backup) and deleted them. (The trick to deleting photos from an album in iPhoto is to use Command-Option-Delete, which I learned from a "Mac 911" article I found using Google. And I had to remember that "Delete" means "Backspace" on non-Macintosh keyboards.)

I deleted 1533 photos from 2005, which freed over 4 GB, and 2021 photos from 2006, which freed over 7 GB. I now have over 12 GB available. I can't remember how long it has been since I've had that much free space. I'm going to enjoy not having to worry about almost being out of space. I wonder how long that will last.