Is Final Cut Pro X Apple's Biggest Mistake In Years? 443
Hugh Pickens writes "The latest version of Final Cut Pro, the widely used tool in the professional video editing world, was getting a reputation as the app that launched a thousand complaints, as the 955 reviewers and raters on iTunes collectively rated FCP as, 'Two and a half stars.' 45% of reviewers gave the software one star, the lowest rating possible, bestowing on the program the dubious honor of being the lowest-rated Apple software hosted by the company's digital store. Many complaints center around lost features. We used to be able to do this, and now we can't. You can't work with existing FCP Suite projects. There's no external video monitoring, no EDL imports, no backup application disk so good luck re-installing the software on the road without a good internet connection, and lots of unanswered questions about site licensing."
Pickens continues: "'This was the product that completely built my company starting in 2000 / 2001 and now it's time for me to say goodbye,' writes Walter Biscardi. 'As I tell everyone else, if the tool isn't working for you, then find a tool that does.' But is this negative response just a very short-term response from editors who have gotten used to doing things the old way and don't want to change? Clearly, there are some amazing new features in FCP X. The 64-bit architecture means much better performance. The new tools such as the magnetic timeline, clip connections, compound clips, and audition seem like intuitive, great features. 'Great design, like great music, is almost always foreign at first, if not disturbingly strange,' writes David Leitner. 'You have to spend time with it. But if it is great, and if you invest your attention, it will change the way you look at the world.'"
Re:Leaving the top 10% behind in the initial relea (Score:4, Informative)
Ask the MS Word team
I can still load Word 95/97 docs in Word 2010. Try again.
Re:Leaving the top 10% behind in the initial relea (Score:5, Informative)
I can still load Word 95/97 docs in Word 2010. Try again.
Sure, you can *open* it. But will it *render* the same. It *might* open all your old files and render them just the way you intended, in which case you'd be perfectly justified in being satisfied with Word's backward capability. Just like somebody who found his files hopelessly screwed up would be perfectly justified in being unsatisfied.
Nobody ever claimed that Word wouldn't go through the motions of opening old Word files and produce *some* kind of output, but my own experience with older versions of Word is that they couldn't be relied upon to render large, complex documents consistently, even if the documents were created in the same versions of Word. Granted, such documents should be produced in something like page layout software, but Word was what we had to produce proposals with and we didn't have time to teach everyone a totally different kind of software.
Setting the compatibility bar at simply *acting* like "everything was hunky dory what's your problem you moron" would make most open source word processing programs "compatible" with MS Office. In fact I'd say they were *more* compatible in that when something goes wrong they tend to hash up formatting, not lose text. That's probably the result of defensive parsing of an undocumented format. In fact, I've found that open source implementations of ".doc" are considerably better at recovering the content of corrupted files than Word, probably for that reason.
Re:When Apple screws you, it's always your fault (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, this is just false. On any modern Mac with a mini-DP (a format I dislike, but not for your reasons), the miniDP->VGA adapter works. I don't know exactly what your issue was, but it is not common to every Macbook Pro I've seen.
If what you said is true, and there was a digital signal on the VGA port, it wouldn't work with any VGA device, because VGA is an analog-only standard. The port is capable of outputting an analog signal over the same connector, though, so it could have been a software issue with the video card. It's also possible that it was outputting an analog signal with a refresh rate your devices were incapable of handling (also a software fix).
VGA will be with us for years because it is still the projector standard in conference rooms, classrooms, and such everywhere. Apple and everyone else knows this. What sucks about mini displayport is 1.) It's not like actual displayport was a big connector, introducing another is just a ploy to make more money on adapters until 3rd parties catch up 2.) The adapters have an unbelievable markup.