Ever had one of those days where everything sucked? You know one of those times when it seemed the whole world was out to get you, and you barely had two dollars in the bank account? Well I can’t tell you what to do about the fact the world is out to get you, but I have a great suggestion for that two dollars. Rent a movie from Redbox. This unique business venture is the brain child of Greg Kaplan (a former executive for McDonalds) that provides a DVD rental kiosk at places such as McDonalds and your local grocery store where you can rent the DVD of your choice for one dollar plus tax.

Yes you heard me right, you can rent a movie for one dollar. What is even more surprising is that despite renting a redbox movie is super cheap, they actually have movies people want to watch! What is even cooler is that while it costs one dollar a night, unlike traditional movie rental outfits like Hollywood video and Blockbuster, you don’t get charged crazy late fees. If you are late returning a DVD you only get charged a single dollar per day of keeping it. Also if you decide you really like the DVD (or loose it) you actually stopped getting charged after twenty five days and that is the end of it. No annoying phone calls, no late fees, no nothing. Its really kind of nice.

As if being able to rent movies for a dollar wasn’t cool to begin with, you can also go the Redbox website and rent it online where you are then given a code. Take the code to the nearest Redbox location, enter it and bang you got your movie in your hand. So with so much positive there have got to be something I can complain about right? Well there is but really kind of a small complaint. Redbox is just not all over yet. While they espouse to have thousands of locations, that means a majority of people still don’t have one near them. However they are working on it and it shouldn’t be to long before almost anyone can find a Redbox location. check out Redbox here.

Most consumers are moving towards the digital life, so it only makes sense to create programs for that lifestyle. iLife is one of those programs. And iLife isn’t one giant program as some may think; iLife is composed of five applications – iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and Garage Band. These applications are designed to help you and your digital lifestyle, and they do so with Apple style-beauty and simplicity. This is the fourth part of my review on the iDVD application for iLife ’08.

There is not much to say about iDVD ‘08. It is the least updated of all the iLife applications, with only the addition of a few new templates and higher quality video being the key updates. The new templates are great, but iDVD feels almost forgotten about this year. Like Apple doesn’t really care about it. I think in the future, Steve Jobs might actually drop this application from the suite. Steve Jobs even quoted, “Some people still want to make DVDs.” I can imagine without much enthusiasm.

For those “some” who still use iDVD, it incorporates a few changes that make it easier to customize DVD menus. The “Buttons” button is no longer a spot for everything related to the navigation elements in each theme. Instead, you get to choose from several options in two categories: icons or underlines when a button is highlighted and the appearance of the buttons themselves.

iDVD still holds a two-hour limit to how much media you can put onto a standard single-sized DVD, but iDVD ’08 provides another encoding option: Professional Quality. I’m not going to get too technical, but the “Pro” setting uses two bit rate encodings, which means that iDVD examines every frame of video twice to determine the best amount of compression to apply; the “High Quality” setting uses a single-pass bit rate. The Pro setting takes more time, of course, and more space.

All in all, iDVD ’08 is a solid, fun upgrade. Given Apple’s apathy in the application, it is somewhat encouraging to see the improvements in iDVD ’08. Like I said, I don’t think there is too much of a chance for iDVD in the future. Only time will tell…

Be sure to check back for the last iLife ’08 application review.