It's kind of funny to see a somewhat iMovie-esque interface. There's an unwritten UI law that if it's more complex, with more knobs and buttons, it must be more "professional". Learning that complexity is a badge of honor that you have to earn. And as a result, there's a resistance in the pro world towards easy-of-use. I really hope Apple can buck that trend and remove what is ultimately just arrogance in that class of product.
When Apple is good at that, I love it. It's depressing when they misstep in this arena and put something out that, below the veneer, doesn't contain much content. On the other hand, something like MacOS X itself is something my mom can use and feel like a pro (while she and my dad frequently get lost and confused with their Windows laptop), but I can also, just one level deeper, use and customize to the fullest extent I need.
It's obviously yet to be proven since this is just a preview announcement, but I don't expect Apple to drop the ball on FCP. Maybe that trust is misguided but the wording between the lines of their presentation seemed to indicate they knew what they were up against. They opened this presentation by listing off the success the app has had in an extremely hardcore and demanding professional community. It sounded like they were trying to very clearly communicate to folks: "We know this app is operated by people who use it to the fullest extent, grinding their top of the line machines into the ground to produce content, and 94% of them already like it the way it is."
So, seeing the comments saying "this just looks like iMovie! They should call it iMovie not Final Cut!" when it looks like what Apple is trying to do is solve problems and add efficiency to the rote surface level tasks of daily FCP use, bum me out.
( and add some we-can't-resist specular shine to the UI chrome, of course)
It's funny, but also great that they're taking this step. The keyboard short-cuts are there for those of us that love them (they even mentioned this in the keynote), but the UI is far more friendly to mouse-based editing (especially with trimming controls).
Aperture 2 to 3 gained a much simpler interface, despite being a 'pro' app. FCX has taken this even further, and I'm glad to see it, because Aperture 3 was far better than 2.
I don't mind convention over configuration (a la Rails) but sometimes it can be quite a pain to move from a highly configurable product (ie Gentoo) to a simpler interface (ie Ubuntu). While I spent years using Gentoo, I enjoy how simple and easy it is to get a running Ubuntu install. Then I try to configure something the way I've always done and Ubuntu's automatic config tools overwrite the changes I made to various text files.
I hope in products like Final Cut Pro, Apple keeps things simple but completely configurable if you would like to.
Hopefully this also represents good news for the Mac Pro hardware and the Mac OS: If they're investing in from-scratch rewrites of apps targeting the above, they must see at least 5-10 years left in those products.
Those of us who like powerful Macs running powerful operating system were starting to think that those things were going away in favor of iThings running iOperating systems.
I'm glad Apple is continuing to work hard on their software offerings, given that they have slightly less incentive to do so than a company such as Adobe.
I'm just hoping to see the same kind of love for Logic Studio sometime soon, a lot of the older synths could do with some UI love, and the app does suffer from having multiple layers of UI (sub-views with their own set of dropdown menus, etc).
So is anything from Apple apart from iTunes running on Carbon anymore? I wonder how many more years Apple will continue supporting that framework before they finally drop it.
Yes, the Finder UI is fundamentally now a Cocoa app.
However, internally Finder still uses many of the same Carbon file management APIs that it always has, simply because there still are no reasonable equivalents in Cocoa.
Many Carbon APIs are still part of the Snow Leopard SDK and are available in 64-bit for that reason; the hot key API is one example.
Basically everything is Cocoa in Snow Leopard with the glaring exception of iTunes and it's really starting to show, they really need to do a rewrite. Hopefully they don't call it iTunes X like they've done with the Final Cut and Quicktime rewrites.
This seems very cheap, I wonder if that means the other pieces of Final Cut Studio will be sold separately on the App Store?
EDIT: Also I wonder if being cheap means that some 'pros' will take it less seriously, or worry that it won't be supported in the same way as more expensive software?
It's going to attract lots of advanced iMovie users. It's going to attract users into buying Mac if FCP is 'the' standard editing software in video industry. For example my cousin is buying a Mac because kids wants GarageBand.
I'd not seen the noise last week around this announcement - seems like Supermeet might've pissed off a few vendors as Apple blocked out the time to announce FCPX: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20051031-37.html
