“Last week the prevailing viewpoint in the Mac community was similar to the sense of betrayal voiced by David Pogue in his New York Times piece about iMovie 08,” Phil Shapiro blogs for PC World.
“But in the rising chorus of anger you could also hear the viewpoint that iMovie 08 is perhaps a small jewel after all. Hal Cauthen, the co-founder of the iMovie Special Interest Group in Washington Apple Pi, a large user group in the Washington DC-area, differed from Pogue in his assessment,” Shapiro writes.
“Is there a lesson to be learned here? Yes. It’s important to reserve judgment and not be too quick out of the gate with your reactions. Apple sometimes makes big mistakes, but they seldom make colossal mistakes,” Shapiro writes.
Full article, with links to Hal Cauthen’s iMovie ’08 viewpoints in three blog postings, here.
shane blyth: Yeah, we can still use ’06, but that’s just glossing over the fact that Apple reduced the capabilities of iMovie. For all the ballyhooing that Apple does about the Mac and iLife being great for creative stuff, iMovie is now less of a true video editor than (gasp) Windows Movie Maker.
Apple could have made it easy on themselves by making iMovie ’08 with two modes: ‘Basic’ which would be what we get in ’08, and ‘Advanced’ which would reveal the features removed from ’08 such as the timeline and audio levels.
@Brau: “Having just made a quick movie with the new iMovie 08, I’ll have to admit it does have a bona-fide place for making ultra quick mash-ups but is definitely NOT an adequate replacement for iMovie 06. It’s simply not precise enough nor does it have enough features.”
Right on, Brau! Which is exactly what all the legions of Apple customers have been saying too. This is not an uprising against the good things in 08 – it’s against the loss of the accumulated good things from 1.0 to 06.
Rory has it exactly right – Apple needs to combine the ease of use and faster engine of iMovie 08 with the feature set iMovie 06 already had. For Jobs to build up a base of users – indeed iMovie’s entire reputation – on software that at VERSION 1.0 did more than this ‘upgrade’ is totally, unequivocally, 100% wrong.
Speaking of “wrong”; it’s pretty clear that MDN posting this story, and all these previously unseen screen names coming out of nowhere and cheering “Hooray for 08!” immediately after, are all part of a Steve Jack ‘plant’. He’s either trying to A] rehab is ruined image, B] create an ‘astroturf’ movement that will (he hopes) bring enough of the ‘lemmings’ around to his way of thinking, or C] both. But whichever you want to latch on to as pre-eminnent, it shows all of you in no uncertain terms just how little the guy running MDN actually respects the opinion of the average Mac user. He won’t accept his previous ‘take’ was wrong-headed, he won’t give any weight to the VAST majority’s needs/wants when it comes to Jobs decisions …
Basically he’s a tool. And decent Mac fans are just website hits to him.
The Magic Word is the only part of this sight that speaks the truth. What do I mean? The one I will have to type in this very moment is – I kid you not – “real”. Fucking freaky, but it does shit like this all the time!
Abide The Word, MDN … Abide The Word.
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As Rory said, it’s really too bad Apple did not incorporate the two together to accommodate basic and advanced users within one app. That would have silenced all the critics. That said, at least it did not erase my iMovie 06; for that I’m very glad.
@@Stubbern Facts (snicker, snicker) and @@me
There are currently 241 reviews of iLife 08 on Apples own online store. You have to be a member of of .Mac to be able to leave a review. well over 80% of the reviews are negative.
I doubt that MS trolls are spending the $$ to leave negative reviews at the Apple Store online.
Seems like lots of posters recently on MDN have come over from the Microsoft ‘Get the Facts’ campaign !oxymoron alert!.
Now we know Microsoft is worried. Now we know Microsoft can’t win. What they don’t know is that FUD only works when hand in hand with bribery (search Preston Gates Ellis) and bribery doesn’t work with consumers when they ripped them off first, and second, and third time around.
That’s not saying some genuine mac users are pissed with changes, change is difficult, even changing from Windows to Mac is too much for some people, but even 80% negative from a loyal fan base is not that bad a score, it’s the pissed people who complain, the happy people just get on with it.
What remains to be seen is how it comes out in a few months time, how Apple responds, how users adapt. Remember OS 10.0, loads of gripes, some got fixed, some people adapted, by 10.3 the world was singing it’s praises.
@Gandalf
Great analogy comparing the transistion of OS 9 to OS X to the current iMovie dilemma. Many features from OS 9 such as spring loaded folders weren’t added till Panther and they also still letted you run OS 9 for when you needed it not unlike Apple still letting you use iMovie ’06. Apple will most likely add all those old features back into iMovie ’08 over the course of this year and they will be way better!
Great point!
Interesting that MDN always, always thinks contribution to these discussions from those of us who are stuck with PCs at work are trolls.
MDN is usually justified in their strong support for Jobs and Apple.
They would be even moreso if they didn’t expose their over-the-top bias by defending something as indefensible as the iMovie 08 blunder that has stabbed the great majority of the iMovie faithful squarely between the shoulder blades.
” Many features from OS 9 such as spring loaded folders weren’t added till Panther”
And the reason they were added back in is because loyal Mac users COMPLAINED about it.
At the Apple Store online iLife ’08 has 287 reviews now, still only 2.5 stars out of 5.
iWork ’08, on the other hand, has a rating of 4 out of 5 stars with 90 reviews.
Does anyone, besides me, find it rather odd that a number of people (who have apparantly never been bothered enough to post anything before) are now rushing in to defend MDN from fellow Mac users?
And isn’t it also odd that MDN is now attempting to find vindication of its “take” by referring to blogs at PC World?
I’m just waiting to read MDN takes (or the absence thereof) of iMovie reviews from Dvork and Enderle.
It’s no wonder there was no MDN take on this guy’s article. This guy is using the same sort of rational as MDN. From the article: “As software users, it’s our duty to look for the intentions of the software designer.”
WTF!! This is insane. The designers intentions don’t mean squat. This guy is as big a tool as Dvorak, Enderle and others of their ilk.
If software works for me, it works. If it doesn’t, then I don’t use it. The only “duty” I have (or any user has) is to determine whether or not a particular application “works” for them. And to abide by the terms of the software EULA.
And that brings up another point.
If Apple didn’t want people using iMovie for “professional” or commercial purposes (several software companies do this sort of thing), then they should have stated that in the EULA for iMovie and in any promotion for the iLife suite. Something alnog the lines of “Not to be used for commercial purposes.”
Why didn’t they?
Maybe it was because Apple was too busy promoting iMovie to non-video professionals in various businesses as a tool that could give them “professional” looking results with their promotional activities.
In other words “for commercial purposes.”
@@Spock:
I’m not saying we shouldn’t complain about the lack of features, just do so in a civil manner. Yeah its missing some features such as themes and effects and a few other things which as a said in my 1st comment are probably going to be added back with Leopard. But look at the blinding bright side:
It added a iPhoto like way of organizing your video library.
Skimming(with sound),selcting movies like text
keywords
rating parts of clips(not just whole clips)
adjust color
croping
events
can automaticly add transistions
selcting parts of music is just as easy as selecting video
titles length can be adjusted live
youtube
lots of other things
And if you think about it, iMovie ’08’s editing style would work great on any future multi-touch Mac
It’s designed for the iphone. The skimming,moving, shifting, simple titling lend itself to a multitouch iphone app. Just wait and see. Shoot with a camera similar to the Panasonic Jobs highlights in his keynote, (8 Gig flashcard) load it straight into the iphone, edit quickly, send to wherever you wish. This is what Imovie will be all about.
get over it children