Tag Archives: ILife

Why is iTunes Absent from the Mac App Store

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Apple released the Mac App Store (MAS) back in January of 2011. Jobs and Co. rolled it  in the update to Mac OS X 10.6.6 and it wasn’t long before companies were clamoring to release their software on the new platform.

Apple's Mac App Store

There were some unfortunate hiccups with the new way of purchasing applications for the desktop Apple operating system. For instance, if you had already purchased a piece of software that is on the MAS, somewhere else, you will not get access to updates through this system. Even if you have a serial number from the purchase, you are kept out.

This is because Apple takes a cut of all purchases made through the MAS and have no real need to serve another storefront’s customers. Some developers worked around this by providing heavily discounted versions of their software initially to ease the cost of users transitioning to the new distribution service.

Of course there were some that not only didn’t offer this option, they even decided to stop supporting their applications’ updates unless they purchased them from the app store. Practices like this were quickly condemned by users for basically forcing them to pay twice for the same software.

I already posted about Apple’s great success on the MAS, check it out here. They manage to keep up around 50-90% of the top paid download on the MAS, out of the thousands of applications available there. On top of that, over 1,000,000 downloads of Mac OS X Lion went through the MAS within the first twenty-four hours!

A thought popped into my head today though. After pushing so hard to make the MAS a success, why hasn’t Apple put its most popular app into the MAS? The only way to get FinalCut Pro X or Mac OS X Lion is through the MAS and as of yesterday, Apple has begun to pull all boxed copies of their software from Apple stores.

Yet, for some reason, iTunes is not available on the MAS.

iTunes is Missing from the Mac App Store

Anyone dare to suggest why? I can’t think of a really solid reason for this. In fact, I’m surprised Apple hasn’t rolled out its developer portal to the MAS. Many developers* like me use the same Apple ID for both the MAS and our dev accounts.

Imagine how great this seamless integration could be for development teams.

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Testing out Apple’s iMovie 11

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I had a few extra minutes (that’s a lie, it seems like I never have time anymore) and thought I’d give Apple’s iMovie 11 a try. Going on reviews, either iMovie 11 is “freaking amazing” or “Anything after iMovie 6 is absolute shit!”

I’ve been in the iMovie is awesome camp since iMovie 09 came out last year. Of course that probably has something to do with the fact that I never used iMovie 6 and that for the longest time, FinalCut Pro scared the living hell out of me. Not any more, now I lust for it, but still, iMovie 09 is pretty awesome considering what you get, for what price and at what skill-level is required to make great video.

So, yes, iMovie 11, what’s up? What’s new?

Better audio editing for voiceovers, music and audio from the video tracks. There are more and better sound effects, iMovie custom music tracks made especially for particular types of films, waveform editing and more. One of my favorite features is the ability to stretch out audio. Say you have a 1 minute clip of video, of which you must use every second, mixed with photos. You don’t want silence going on during your photo portions right? Either you put in a music bed or you spilt a video and audio track and copy the audio over. This works but is a little too obvious. With iMovie, you can just stretch the audio clip out and boom, great background audio for your photos! You can see that in the behind the scenes footage of a Drunk Driving public service announcement I’ve posted below.

The video was shot with my iPhone 4 with photos from my Nikon D700. I was capturing some behind the scenes stuff for the production crew making a drunk driving PSA. They were shooting with Red One Cinema cameras and then there I was with a freaking iPhone. Oh well. This video was really just a test of the audio features in iMovie, trying to get that NPR style.

There is also instant replay. Which is… instant replay. They add 12 special effects for these but nothing too crazy exciting. Well, except the “Jump Cut at Beat” effect. It’s basically the perfect effect for any garage band wanting to make a music video. Hmmm, garage bands… wonder if Apple makes a product for them. Oh yeah, GarageBand. How it works? Skips footage ahead to the beat of the music. Pretty fun effect.

Creepy, cool or revolutionary, you decide. The People Finder feature doesn’t really find or identify people like Faces does in iPhoto or Aperture, instead it does something that might actually be more helpful. It counts the number of people in a shot and can tell if the shot is a close up, wide shot or medium shot. Faces is already integrated into Aperture and iPhoto which are also integrated into iMovie so… best of both worlds? I’d wager so.

Themes. There are a lot of them. They are slick but also easily recognizable. Let’s leave it at that.

Distribution. This was surprising. Previously we had YouTube and MobileMe, now Apple has added Facebook, Vimeo and CNN iReport. The CNN integration is crazy. This is the future of journalism put into the hands of the people.

What is it they say?… Vox populi? This might be the biggest feature, if not the most under-represented.

But what feature will be the most overused of the bunch? Why the Trailer maker of course! In under 15 minutes I went through a gig or so of random footage and made a quick, mildly sardonic, trailer of my trip to Saudi Arabia last January.

I made this video to try out the trailers feature and to make some use of the video I shot last winter. It was incredibly easy, fast and surprisingly robust in features.

It’s easy, too easy really. I predict a flood of iMovie trailers flooding YouTube in 3…2…1…

Bottom line. iMovie 11 is solid, fast, surprisingly powerful and full of features, yet at a price that is honestly, laughably low. For $50 you get iLife 11 which includes a video editor that would otherwise be worth around $150, a photo library management software (iPhoto) that would be valued at around $50, a music creation and audio editing software suite easily worth $100-150 and iWeb (say $70), iDVD ($30) and this magical cohesion that brings them all together (priceless).

Apple Releases Aperture 3

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I think I’m in love.

Apple released their third generation of their professional image management software, Aperture.  Aperture 1 was the first of it’s kind, a real photo management system that handled large libraries of raw files and  allowed it’s users unprecedented access and mobility through their image library.

But really, it was little more than iPhoto with some bells and whistles.  Aperture 2 came out with dozens of improvements and new features including major speeds increases, plugins and support for dozens of new raw file formats.

Aperture 3 is built on Apple’s 64bit codebase so we should expect even greater speed increases as well as greater stability.  It now handles video files which is very exciting to me and any photographer who is looking into transitioning into multimedia.  Wedding photographers are especially subject to this shift, responsible for shooting the stills and video of a wedding with the flip of a switch on their Canon 7D or 5DMII cameras.  Nikon… yeah, where are you with this?

For the first time, Aperture has ever feature that iPhoto has, well, for as long as until iLife ’10 comes out.  Places and Faces are finally in Aperture as well as native Facebook and Flickr integration.

Non-destructive brushes and U Point style technology of editing, which made Nik Software’s Viveza a huge hit, is built right in to the application.   Don’t forget the new a smoother workflow, increased organization techniques, largely due to Faces and Places integration and import actions.

I requested my Aperture 3 license today and hope to receive it soon so I can try out the latest iteration of my favorite photo management system.  On second thought, Photo Management System, PMS, might be the wrong classification.  Almost as bad as the iPad…

Adobe released Lightroom 3 beta a few months ago.  I gave it a try, substituting Aperture 2 for Lightroom 3 for over a month.  In the end, Aperture 2 proved to me to be a better solution for me so I can only imagine how great Aperture 3 will be.

Come on Apple, send me that License! Hopefully it will come in time for me to build my presentation for PS Gallery!

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