iMovie 08 - Maybe It's a Small Jewel After All
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.
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.
You can read Hal's viewpoints in these three blog postings.
iMovie 08 - Yet More Impressions
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.
As software users, it's our duty to look for the intentions of the software designer. Way back in the last century I designed some commercial educational software that was evaluated by two different school districts. One district rated the software 5 out of 5. The other school district rated the same software 1 out of 5.
As it happens, one of those school districts has students with the best academic performance in the nation and the other school district has students with some of the worst academic performance in the nation.
Can you match up which school district gave which score to the software I designed? Right. We don't see beauty unless we go looking for it.
The blogger has been working to bridge the digital divide for 20 years in the Washington DC-area. He loves Macs, adores Linux and likes Windows. Reader responses welcome in the comments below or at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com
Would you like to be a Community Voices blogger? If so, please send a letter of interest and a sample blog entry (what you would post here if you were already a blogger for us) to forums@pcworld.com. We'd love to hear your perspective.
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The new iMovie 08 looks like a quick way to get good results. And that's what most folks want. Many were intimidated by earlier iMovie versions.
At the Apple Store online iLife '08 has 287 reviews now, still only 2.5 stars out of 5. You have to be a .Mac subscriber to post there, so this can't be attributed to astroturfing or diabolical MS trolls.
The overwhelming theme of the threads are that iLife 08 is very good, except for iMovie 08. It is give very bad reviews by well over 80% of the people who post there. There are loyal Apple customers that are seriously upset about feature loss between versions.
My 9 year old nephew uses iMovie 06 HD... so the argument about people being intimidated by earlier versions simply doesn't wash. It was very easy to use.
Imagine if MS released a new operating system to replace XP that was buggy, slow, easier to hack, and wasn't compatible with current versions of software. It would get horrible reviews wouldn't it? (tongue in cheek, they did with Vista).
That's exactly my point with iMovie 08. It is a horrible replacement for an application that has a large user base.
Most griping will be from previous iMovie users who have learned the old program. For me I just switched to Mac this month and was struggling with iMovie 06. Was able to upgrade to 08 for $11 and was glad I did. This iMovie 08 was what I was looking for a quick and simple way to create a DVD movie. Without wasting hours going through clips. For most users who are impatient or don't want a career in video editing this is what we are looking for.