I’ve been pretty positive in previous posts about OS X and my Apple experience in general… but now let me point out that the new iLife suite, specifically iMovie and iPhoto, is so broken as to be nearly useless to me. iMovie’s new skimming [scrubbing] feature is great but, er, not worth discarding almost every other feature expected in a video editor (even a free one). iPhoto has a similar skimmy feature which does make it easier to quickly browse for things visually, but iPhoto still runs so badly that I avoid using it wherever possible.
Also, considering that Apple is usually seen as the industry leader in modern GUI design, it can be pretty frustrating discovering what doesn’t work. A case in point, I recently shot some video on my Canon IXUS and wanted to edit in in iMovie, and this is pretty much how it went:
- Connect camera to MacBook
- Wait patiently for iPhoto to go take a shit and a shower
- Select "Import all"
- Study the activity monitor and wonder why each photo/short video seems to take minutes to import
- Bravely select "delete all from camera" once import is done
- Open iMovie
- Ponder how the hell you’re going to get that movie from iPhoto into iMovie
- Notice a button with an icon shaped like a still camera, and realize that this opens a browser into the iPhoto library
- Browse to the "event" recently imported, to discover that only still photos are showing up, not the videos
- Sigh in exasperation
- Note that in the collections pane there is an icon marked "iPhoto videos" and click that
- It says there are no items
- see 10
- Switch to iPhoto and drag the clip from iPhoto onto iMovie
- Movie clip sproings harmlessly back whence it came
- see 10
- Repeat steps 14-16 several times choosing different target panes to no avail, until swearing occurs
- Select "import movies" in iMovie file menu
- Browse to iPhoto library in home folder, to discover that it is not browseable/expandable from within iMovie
- see 10
- Close both iMovie and iPhoto
- Run Parallels, launch WindowsXP
- Run Windows Movie Maker, of all things
- Select import movies, browse to shared OSX home folder, into [now browsable] iPhoto library and find the avi you imported in step 3
- Perform minimal editing task and export compressed movie for upload
On top of this frustration of accessing videos from iPhoto, iMovie ’08 dispenses with all video effects except for color adjustment and cropping. This means you can’t mirror or change speed of playback of a clip. Without the ability to control frame rate/playback of a clip a video editor is useless to me, since I shoot at 15/30/60fps a lot and need to be able to manipulate this for playback. No distortion effects, no cheap fog and rain effects, no nothing! To make up for this obvious deficiency you can now go to Apple and download iMovie 06 for free… but what kind of solution is that? Can you imagine how much people would trash Microsoft if they released a sexified version of Word which actually removed half the standard features, then told people it was ok they could just use the old version when they needed those…?
In my day to day computing I’m surprised to find myself drifting back towards Windows, even for web browsing, so it’s lucky that Macs can run both OS’s now. OSes. OSs. Oh-Esses. Windows apps are always less sexy but they are often more general purpose. Mac apps are great for helping Steve Jobs show off but they don’t necessarily make your life easier.
And no, I am not interested in trying Feisty Fawn Ubuntu or whatever it’s called… I don’t need yet another operating system.