Search Results for: "mac app store"

I’m sure you’re familiar with the elementary school math problem where you need precisely four litres of water, but you only have unmarked containers of three and five litres. You’re supposed to juggle the water between the pails in order to get a nice, even four litres of total water.

Now picture that problem, but instead of water, you have terabytes of very precious personal data, music, photos, and videos. Instead of buckets, you have a few hard drives. And you’re not moving water as a trivial exercise, but making the move to a brand new computer to last the next five years.

I purchased a mid-2007 MacBook Pro soon after it launched. It came with Tiger (version 10.4.7, I believe), and has since been upgraded with every major (and minor) OS update, a new hard drive, and a few surprising tweaks. It has served me well in editing video and photos, and designing and building websites. It’s not just a computer any more—it’s the tool I’ve used for everything I’ve done to forge a career, and to become a better student. But it’s Old ‘N’ Busted.

On August 13, 2012, 1,865 days after placing my order for that MacBook Pro, I clicked the “Complete Order” button for a computer again, this time for a mid-2012 MacBook Air. New Hotness. It’s the 13″ model, because I tried the 11″ in an Apple Store and found Photoshop to be too cramped. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB, for future proofing, and maxed-out the processor.

It’s a huge upgrade. Not only is it a Pro to an Air, but more importantly, it’s a 2007 machine to a 2012 machine. It has a faster processor, despite being 0.4 GHz slower on paper¹, faster memory (and twice as much of it), a solid-state drive, and longer battery life. It’s thinner and lighter than my Pro, it’s ridiculously powerful, and super quiet. It’s also my first unibody machine.

I will admit that it was a tough call to not choose a retina MacBook Pro. I’m mobile enough that I need a notebook, but when I’m at my desk, I connect to an external display. When I was 14, I saw a 30″ Cinema Display in person, and I’ve coveted it ever since. I purchased a Thunderbolt Display to accompany my Air, to and to replace a terrible Dell monitor. Finally, I get to own a display of nearly equivalent size, and with the same horizontal pixel count. It has a better panel, a bunch of connectors, and is about half the price, to boot.

But, as I said, I needed a flawless way to move my terabytes of stuff from one computer to another. Some things are easy: I have a bunch of movies I’ve ripped from DVDs or bought on iTunes kicking around on a MyBook, so I don’t have to move a single byte—I can just connect it to my Thunderbolt Display. Some things are a little more complicated, however. My music library is 300 GB, and is perhaps the most precious folder of data I have. Most everything else can be stored in the cloud, but my music cannot².

Luckily, while I was looking for solutions to this mess, Paul Haddad pointed out an inexpensive Thunderbolt drive from Buffalo. I went ahead and picked up a terabyte model. I’ve split it right down the middle. Half is partitioned as a Time Machine drive for the Air, and the other half is for my iTunes library.

Everything else has to be moved over by hand, though, for two very good reasons:

1. The Air’s drive isn’t big enough for the remainder of my data, so I can’t use Migration Assistant.

2. I want to rid myself of the cruft I’ve built up over the years. I’m sure I have a bunch of preference files for applications I don’t have any more, documents I will never again touch, and things I simply don’t need to move over.

Most applications can be moved over with a drag and drop, or downloaded again from the Mac App Store. I had to deal with a bit of DRM nonsense on the Photoshop side, but a quick deactivation of my Pro and activation of the Air made it easier than I had anticipated. Indie applications like Yojimbo and all my Panic apps were a piece of cake to move (and Panic’s automatic serial number finder made that process totally painless).

Everything has been working swimmingly so far. I have been consistently blown away by how fast, quiet, sturdy, and elegant the MacBook Air is. The Thunderbolt Display is a wonderful piece of hardware, though it wouldn’t have killed Apple to add a 3.5mm headphone jack. Minor quibbles aside, this is an awesome upgrade. I have managed to push my MacBook Pro (and its original MagSafe cable) to five years of great use in the classroom, across France in a TGV, across the Atlantic in a Boeing, and right here on my desk. I feel exceedingly lucky.

iTunes is a behemoth of an application. It’s a cross-platform, jukebox cum store cum multimedia library cum social network, and its interface represents a decade of this mutation. It has been roundly criticized for years for its ostensibly inefficient nature. Last month, for example, Jason Snell wrote a good piece for Macworld:

Apple has packed almost everything involving media (and app) management, purchase, and playback into this single app. It’s bursting at the seams. It’s a complete mess. And it’s time for an overhaul.

Snell, like everyone else who has levelled criticism of iTunes, has a good point here. It’s easy to point out that iTunes is broken because this is a point that everyone who uses it seems to agree upon. However, I want to take a look at why it is broken, and what needs to be fixed.

As I see it, iTunes performs three major functions, plus one additional: it organizes and plays media (including apps), it syncs media to other devices, and it allows for the purchase of media. The “+1” is iTunes Ping, which is that social network you’ve forgotten about. These aspects are viewed by many as unique and disparate, and should be treated as such. Snell, again:

It might be better off being split into separate apps, one devoted to device syncing, one devoted to media playback. (And perhaps the iTunes Store could be broken out separately too? When Apple introduced the Mac App Store, it didn’t roll it into iTunes, but gave it its own app.)

Au contriare, I contend that these functions are intertwined and necessary for each other. For now, though, I’ll critique them separately.

Media Playback

iTunes began as a simple music jukebox in January, 2001¹. It had a big list of every song you owned, a panel that displayed the currently-playing song, a search interface, and that was about it. When the iPod was released in October of the same year, iTunes gained some syncing features. When the iTunes Store was introduced, it was added to the desktop application. When the Store began selling music videos, movie playback made its way into iTunes. And so on, for every new feature: ringtones, audiobooks, podcasts, the iPhone, Apple TV, and Genius.

Media playback is at the core of iTunes. But it has struggled to cope in the wake of these new additions. Music organization, for example, is difficult despite numerous UI overhauls. All jukebox apps have a list view, which is information-dense, but is impenetrable with a library of more than a few hundred songs. In iTunes 8, Apple introduced a “Grid” view, which is good for moderate-sized libraries that are perfectly tagged with album artwork. Cover Flow, introduced in iTunes version who-gives-a-crap, is a fancy way of showing the list view with album artwork, but is also challenging for more than a few dozen albums.

The best view in iTunes, by far, is the hybrid view, which looks like the list view with album covers in the left-hand column. It’s quick to spot an album that you’re looking for, and works in a logical, hierarchical fashion. It still is not a great way to browse a large library, though. Combined with the browser, it is acceptable, but only just.

The problems facing the most rudimentary aspect of iTunes illustrates the complexity of the challenges Apple’s user interface designers are undertaking. There has to be a better way to catalogue a lot of media and display it in an efficient, logical way. Apple has succeeded, in my opinion, with the Music interface on the iPhone. I have around 3,500 songs on my iPhone, and it’s as easy to find a specific song as it is to shuffle the entire library. Of course, the iPhone has the unique qualities of a smaller display with a touch interface, so the UI cannot be directly ported. The inherent ideas are strong, however.

Purchasing

If it’s difficult to design an interface for organizing a library of 3,000 songs that scales well to 30,000 songs, it’s damn near impossible for a library of 17 million songs. The iTunes Store is an enormous catalogue of music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, books, and applications. Each of these are similar insomuch as they all are purchased and downloaded through iTunes, but that’s where things get complicated.

Much in the same way that music and movies have different browsing interfaces in iTunes, so must they have different purchasing interfaces. Different information is required about each, and Apple has succeeded here. Likewise for apps, podcasts, and books.

Where they have arguably failed is in the discovery of media. Ping was an attempt to create this atmosphere, but it has been largely unsuccessful. Genius recommendations are often decent, but buried in amongst a confusing interface. The Store is not an easy problem, obviously, but its entire workflow needs to be reconsidered for a better discovery path to emerge.

Syncing

Ah, the one feature everyone loves to hate.

iTunes syncing is unbelievably slow. Every time I drop my iPhone into my dock to add an album, it first has to back up its contents, figure out what needs to be changed, make the changes, and then verify it. Overall, this can take upwards of ten minutes, which is simply too long in 2012. Every step of the syncing process is important, however one gets the feeling that it should be quicker.

The verification process at the end of any sync is the part that kills me. I’ve been fairly lucky, but I know of a number of people who have high failure rates. But for it to improperly sync even once is a major issue. I have been copying files onto external hard drives on a daily basis for years and have never seen an error. I recognise that syncing and copying are two different concepts, but they use the same underlying principles. Syncing should never fail.

Finally, the syncing interface is clunky at best. App management is terrible, and the syncing interface doesn’t scale with the window ². Syncing is, hands-down, the worst individual element of iTunes as it stands today.

Monolithic vs. Modular

Should iTunes be separated into three distinct applications, then? Perhaps one for playback, one for purchasing, and one for syncing? You can get a taste of what this might be like by double-clicking items in the sidebar to separate them into their own window. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

There are three distinct tasks here, but each are as vital to another as you’d think. Separating iTunes into different applications would be like moving the “import” function in Aperture or iMovie to another application. This is without even considering the nightmare it would be to port three applications to Windows instead of one.

People often refer to iTunes as a victim of bloat, but I disagree. I see bloat as an application gaining features far beyond its scope, such as a word processor with website creation features. If iTunes were as fast as any other application, I doubt we would hear arguments of bloat, because the features it has gained over the years make sense for its role. It’s a clunky beast, but it would suck worse if it were three mediocre ones. Think of it as Thor, instead of the Lernaean Hydra.

Maybe they’ll change the icon to a big-ass hammer to match.

On Thursday morning in New York, Phil Schiller outlined a number of problems in the current state of the American education system. He cited the low graduation rates of high school students, and noted that the United States wasn’t in the international top ten for reading, math or science. One of challenges, he noted, was keeping kids engaged in an era of constant entertainment. Apple, he said, could overcome this hurdle with three enhancements to the technology they currently ship and, as he pointed out, is already in use by millions of students.

iBooks 2: Textbooks

Textbooks are loathed by students and teachers alike. In the last century, the rate of scientific and historical discovery ensures that textbooks are out of date the minute they are printed. They aren’t interactive, and cannot present anything animated. This becomes evident the moment anything living is analysed. Static diagrams cannot represent these dramatic changes and movements effectively.

Apple’s solution is to provide students with digital textbooks filled with animations, live information and interviews. This isn’t unprecedented, as Kyle Rose notes:

This isn’t exciting because Apple’s the first company to create worthwhile digital textbooks. That honor goes to Inkling. It’s exciting because Apple’s the only company that is in a position to completely change how we learn, and iBooks certainly has the power to do so.

Apple is putting these digital textbooks on devices that students often already own, in a way that’s convenient and accessible. Aside from Amazon, nobody else has this level of content distribution, and Amazon isn’t doing this.

One can gush at length about the new possibilities offered by digital textbooks. I highly recommend watching the keynote or buying one of the books to experience it. Though if you’re concerned about price, you are in for a shock. There are a number of free samples on the store, and the full textbooks are only $14.99. Fifteen dollars for a textbook. That’s an unheard-of deal.

Of course there are drawbacks with this just-launched product. Textbooks are only available in the US, for now, and they’ve only announced high school books, and therefore only high school pricing. Expect post-secondary books to be more expensive, but to significantly undercut the price of the physical books by a similarly-huge margin. On a curious note, despite the use of the iBooks application, there are no page-turn animations. Rather, the pages slide left-to-right like a PDF. I suspect Apple was aching to remove their interpretation of textbooks from the physical version as much as possible.

But these limitations are quickly forgotten as you discover how simple it is to highlight a section, how quick it is to jump to a specific concept, and how effortless studying becomes. Apple has created a marvellous and delightful product from the oft-loathed textbook. Welcome to the new education.

iBooks Author

Along with the revamped iBooks application for iOS, Apple unveiled a curious and controversial counterpart for Mac OS X. It’s an iBooks-authouring application, but it isn’t quite that straightforward.

At first glance, iBooks Author could be mistaken an addition to the iWork suite. It is something of a hybrid of Keynote and Dashcode, from Apple’s developer tools. And because it’s free, I highly recommend you grab it from the Mac App Store and take it for a spin.

There are a few quirks with the app. The most notable one that I’ve discovered is that it’s set up only to produce the highly interactive books, and is therefore an inadequate self-publishing solution for those that would prefer to publish a more text-heavy novel or short story. Amazon does a much better job with their Kindle Singles. There’s also no option to embed fonts. John Gruber hopes that it’s just a 1.0 omission, but I suspect that it’s a licensing issue. iBooks Author is a free app, and anyone can publish a book to the iBookstore. Sorting out potentially thousands of font licenses would grind the submission process to a halt.

But the biggest issue with the app comes in the form of its end user license agreement (EULA). Dan Wineman calls it “audacious” and “unprecedented”, referring to this section:

If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

That is to say that any book created through iBooks Author may only be sold for more than free through the iBookstore. You’re allowed to export and distribute it in other formats provided you do not charge for it. The EULA’s control over the product of the app that is what’s outrageous, as Wineman explains:

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty.

I wholly agree that this is Apple overstepping its legal boundaries. They wanted to gain as much traction in the market as possible, and the quickest way of doing that is to release the software for free. But Apple needs to protect its investment and take its 30% cut. In the end, it’s controlling in a way that no other software is.

iTunes U App

After Apple had concluded the above announcements, the keynote felt like it was going to be over. Yet Schiller stood on stage and announced that there was something else that they had been working on to enhance education. Eddy Cue presented an app that I feel is one of the most beautiful they’ve ever shipped.

iTunes U is Apple’s free educational lecture collection on the iTunes Store. Since launching in 2007, Cue announced that it had become the world’s largest selection of free university courses. Conversely, I have treated iTunes U as a curiosity in the store. Today, Apple injected a little bit of life into it with their iTunes U app.

It is — quite simply — beautiful. It looks like iBooks made out of mahogany and brass. Everything looks rich, nobel and musty. Downloading a course is a joy, as the app bundles all the materials needed into the file structure. They’re not necessarily included in the initial download, but are made available to stream as needed. Every course gets broken down into a series of lectures, topics or themes, and the app connects with the new textbooks in iBooks where appropriate. It’s an exquisite experience, and one I cannot believe is provided for free.

The New Education

Nothing above will be remembered if Apple fails on its core premise of creating an education experience for the twenty-first century. This depends on wide acceptance, and could come to a grinding halt if any of the textbook publishers decide that it isn’t worth it. It’s good that Apple has the balls to disrupt the market in this way.

Though Schiller did not mention it, the students that have a higher likelihood of doing poorly in school or dropping out altogether are those from low-income families, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This presents an unusual problem for Apple. The students that can afford — and probably already own — an iPad are higher-income students. This is an issue that Business Insider raised in their decidedly awful response to today’s announcements. If they did the math using their own figures, however, the iPad ranks favourably.

Depending on the school, a full courseload is anywhere from 4-8 classes per semester, so for this example, 6 classes will suffice. Business Insider cites a typical textbook price of $75 and notes Apple’s maximum price for high school books is $15. Therefore, the first term will cost $450 for traditional textbooks, or $90 for Apple’s textbooks plus $500 for an iPad, for a total of $590. The traditional books lose their advantage in the second term, however, as it’s another $450 for those, for a total of $900. The student with the iPad is only going to pay another $90, for a year-total of $680.

This is, of course, a hypothetical example. A student probably won’t need textbooks in every class they’re taking. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that a high school student will be purchasing all of their books; instead, they’ll likely be borrowing them from the school’s library. However, the burden that shared textbooks place on a school is obvious. Students can’t mark the books up because they don’t own them. The school must purchase enough books for an entire class, or several classes, and a number of these will need to be replaced at the end of each term.

To maximise their success, Apple has offered schools an easy way to purchase a large number of digital textbooks. They could then distribute the redemption codes on the first day of class. It has a cost advantage, too: for the price of a single physical textbook, a school could purchase 6 of the digital textbooks. For some schools, this will be a wise investment. For others — likely those with much lower budgets — paper textbooks will prevail. They don’t have the wiggle room to experiment.

For what it’s worth, I hope that this works out. This won’t just benefit Apple; rather, it will change the textbook industry permanently. It’s one that’s desperate for disruption.

Via Apple:

Final Cut Pro X is a breakthrough in nonlinear video editing. The application has impressed many pro editors, and it has also generated a lot of discussion in the pro video community. We know people have questions about the new features in Final Cut Pro X and how it compares with previous versions of Final Cut Pro. Here are the answers to the most common questions we’ve heard.

We added some cool new features in Final Cut Pro. These features impressed pro editors until they actually used it, and realized that none of their previous projects would work in the new version. This pissed them off royally.

Can I import projects from Final Cut Pro 7 into Final Cut Pro X? Final Cut Pro X includes an all-new project architecture structured around a trackless timeline and connected clips. In addition, Final Cut Pro X features new and redesigned audio effects, video effects, and color grading tools. Because of these changes, there is no way to “translate” or bring in old projects without changing or losing data. But if you’re already working with Final Cut Pro 7, you can continue to do so after installing Final Cut Pro X, and Final Cut Pro 7 will work with Mac OS X Lion. You can also import your media files from previous versions into Final Cut Pro X.

Fuck no.

Can I import my video directly into Final Cut Pro X as I could in Final Cut Pro 7? Yes. Final Cut Pro X allows you to import video from a wide range of devices, including many AVCHD-based cameras and DSLR cameras. You can find a list of supported cameras here. The list will grow as we continue to test and qualify new cameras. [truncated]

(no translation necessary)

Can I edit my tape-based workflow with Final Cut Pro X? Yes, in a limited manner. Final Cut Pro X is designed for modern file-based workflows and does not include all the tape capture and output features that were built into Final Cut Pro 7. Final Cut Pro X does support FireWire import for DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, and HDV. In addition, companies like AJA and Blackmagic offer free deck control software that allows you to capture from tape and output to tape.

You still edit on tape? Get with the times, man.

Does Final Cut Pro X support multicam editing? Not yet, but it will. Multicam editing is an important and popular feature, and we will provide great multicam support in the next major release. Until then, Final Cut Pro X offers some basic support with automatic clip synchronization, which allows you to sync multiple video and audio clips using audio waveforms, creating a Compound Clip that can be used for simple multicam workflows.

Hell no. Funny story: we knew people wanted this, but we really needed to meet some deadlines. Therefore, we took a page out of Motorola’s book and shipped it in an incomplete state and somehow managed to charge $300 for it. We’re geniuses.

[boring FAQ points truncated]

Are keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro X different from those in Final Cut Pro 7? Many keyboard shortcuts for navigation, start/end marking, and tools are the same in Final Cut Pro X and Final Cut Pro 7. Some keyboard shortcuts have changed to support new features. Final Cut Pro X offers powerful keyboard customization, and you can view and modify keyboard shortcuts at any time by choosing Final Cut Pro > Commands > Customize.

We took a page out of Adobe’s book and moved a few shortcut keys around. Good thing you don’t rely on those or anything. Right?

Can I use my third-party plug-ins in Final Cut Pro X? You’ll be able to use them as soon as they are updated.

Nope.

Can Final Cut Pro X export XML? Not yet, but we know how important XML export is to our developers and our users, and we expect to add this functionality to Final Cut Pro X.

Does Final Cut Pro X support OMF, AAF, and EDLs? Not yet.

Does Final Cut Pro X allow you to assign audio tracks for export? Not yet. An update this summer will allow you to use metadata tags to categorize your audio clips by type and export them directly from Final Cut Pro X.

Nope, nope and, uh, no. Aren’t you glad you paid $300 for this upgrade?

Can I purchase a volume license? Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, and Compressor 4 Commercial and Education Volume Licensing will be available soon via the Apple Online Store for quantities of 20 or more. After purchasing, customers will receive redemption codes they can use to download the applications from the Mac App Store.

Now that you’ve read our extensive FAQ on why we took a bunch of stuff out of the product you rely on, we’ll soon be offering the chance to purchase enormous quantities of said product. It was clearly the price that consumers had a problem with.