The browser, for instance: I often find myself clicking a link to a slow website — or maybe there’s some other network hiccup — and nothing happens. Or at least that’s how it seems. There actually is a subtle indication that I’ve successfully clicked, and it comes in the form of a pinwheel or a progress dial in the loading tab — what we used to call the Throbber back in the Netscape days — that tells me that, yes, I clicked and now the page is loading. But these subtle indicators are often lost on new users, or less tech-savvy ones. And, to be quite honest, they’re often lost on me as well.

Netscape Throbber

Links are small, and with the inaccuracies that tend to accompany touchpad use, I miss them a lot. This is especially true on pages like Facebook which often load new content just before you click said link, causing your link to shift position, thus causing you to miss it through no fault of your own and in a way that you might be completely unaware of. So it’s important to know simply that you clicked. That you nailed it.

Clicking in one spot and then having to look in a completely different spot to see if I successfully clicked is not only inefficient, it’s really annoying. It totally breaks my flow and it also doesn’t make much sense except within the historical context of the Netscape-style Throbber. Why not make the progress indicator closer to the link you just clicked? Or cover the page with some sort of translucent graphic? Or use some sort of Heads Up Display?

Chrome Throbber

The Finder is guilty too. The throbber for searches performed in a Finder window is a small radial line throbber in the status bar in the lower right corner of the window. By default, in Lion, the status bar is hidden, thus the throbber, too, is hidden by default. But even when visible, it’s nowhere near the search bubble, nor is it anywhere near where the search results begin to appear. Unless you know that the throbber is there — and I certainly missed it for a long time — you’ll likely be oblivious to its existence.

Finder Throbber

But, you say, search results appear so instantaneously, there’s no need for a throbber. Well, sure, except when they don’t. Say you’re searching a network volume, for instance. This type of search is much slower since it doesn’t rely on the local Spotlight database to perform the search, so results can take some time to appear. Also, without a throbber, how do you know when Spotlight has finished searching, particularly on a large volume with lots of results? Feedback, my friends. Feedback.

This should be the rule — and maybe it already is somewhere, but if it isn’t it should be. If I click on something I should get immediate feedback that tells me simply that I successfully clicked, that I hit my target, and it should be obvioulsy apparent. Details beyond this, like what’s happening now that I’ve interacted with my computer, should also be evident. But it seems like lately we’re really falling down on the, “Hey, you clicked something,” front. And it’s been bugging me. A lot. Because in computerland, clicking on something and receiving no feedback whatsoever has always meant one thing and one thing only: it’s broken.

Browser developers, OS programmers, you want to rethink an interface? You want to make a better mousetrap? Start there. Start with feedback. It’s quite basic, but feedback is so very important to the computing experience. And while I wouldn’t say it’s completely broken, it, like everything in life, can always get better.

Long live the Throbber!

UPDATE: One reader has decided to begin recording every instance of radial throbbers he can find. Check ‘em out at Samuel Henry’s Space!

The Problem
If you ever want to, say, sell your now SSD-equipped computer, you’re probably going to want to erase its contents as securely as possible. Back in the HD days, this was very well-understood and relatively easy to do. You simply overwrote every bit of data on your Hard Drive numerous times with zeroes or random data or what have you. There are command-line tools that allow you to do this, as well as Disk Utility’s Secure Erase Options, which allow very secure and thorough erasure of a drive. But because of the way that SSDs work, all this goes out the window.

I’m not a Hard Drive or SSD expert, but, in a nutshell, in order to maintain performance and increase longevity, SSDs add another level of abstraction between the device and the filesystem that makes it impossible for the OS to accurately know the location of a given file on the actual device. This means that it’s virtually impossible to securely erase individual files. So the question becomes: How do I securely erase the entire drive?

We Want… Information (-ation, -ation)
The tools and procedures for securely erasing SSDs are not self-evident. I poured over a pretty hefty amount of literature before arriving at a method that I think will work fairly effectively. Since there’s no way to accurately erase individual files, this method erases the entire SSD. And since the best way to do this, while still balancing usability and effectiveness, is to use encryption, we’ll be enabling FileVault 2 in Lion, as well as, of all things, Find My Mac in iCloud. I’ll go over all of this in a bit, but let me first talk a bit about my thinking.

My Thinking
The most secure way to delete an SSD is to find a way to scrub the drive, to go through every cell on the SSD and overwrite the data, similar to how you would securely delete a typical hard drive, but at the hardware level. Out of the box the Mac has no way to do this. There are a variety of Linux and Windows utilities — some of which come directly from the drive vendors — that allow you to do this, but they require a huge number of hoops to jump through, not the least of which is creating a Linux LiveCD or Windows machine to boot from, as well as a significant time investment. Using this method, while perhaps a more secure deletion of the data, will be time consuming, difficult and error-prone.

As I mentioned, there’s a ton of literature on the topic of securely erasing SSDs, but the vast majority of it is theoretical. There are very few articles that actually tell you, practically, how to go about securely erasing your SSD. What got me thinking in the right direction was an article from Ars Technica that very broadly discussed the various difficulties with and methods for secure SSD erasure. In it, they talk about drive scrubbing approaches, but then they also mention using an encryption-based approach:

“The most popular option for protecting data, absent of robust secure erasing tools that scrub right down into the over-provisioned cracks, is to encrypt the SSD’s contents. This way, if someone’s coming after your data, the only thing you need to make sure is off the drive is the security key (128- or 256-bit AES is recommended) and your bits will be safe, unless whoever wants your data is up to cracking that code.“

This caught my attention, because it sounds very much to me like the secure erase procedure that newer iPhones use. If you’ve ever securely erased an iPhone 3GS or later, you may have noticed that it goes extremely fast. Older phones take a long time because they’re actually scrubbing the SSD clean of data, but newer ones are really fast because all they’re actually doing is deleting the encryption key, making the data virtually impossible to access.

Finding a similar procedure for an SSD-equipped Mac was no easy feat, but I think I’ve dug one up that may work for most typical users who just want to pass on their SSD-equipped Macs without worrying about someone accessing their private data. The thing that’s tricky about doing this is that Apple has provided no similar utility for erasing SSDs as they have for the iPhone. On an iPhone you simply go to your Settings and choose:
General->Reset->Erase All Content and Settings.

There is no such utility on a Mac.

Or is there?

Enter: FileVault 2
Mac OS X10.7, Lion, has a new feature called full disk encryption, now popularly known as FileVault 2. What FileVault 2 does is take all the data on your boot drive — which in my case is my SSD — and encrypts it. The encryption key is stored on the disk and is only accessible with your home account password (or any other user’s password that you allow). In and of itself, in fact, assuming you have a reasonably secure password, simply enabling FileVault 2 on your boot drive provides a pretty decent degree of security: No one can access the contents of your disk without your password.

Encryption key deletion, a la the iPhone, provides the final layer of security, but how do you go about doing such a thing? The Apple literature on FileVault 2 makes reference to something called “Instant Wipe:”

“With FileVault 2, instant wipe removes the encryption key from your Mac instantaneously, making the data completely inaccessible.“

Enter: iCloud & Find My Mac
I have yet to find a way to access this “Instant Wipe” from my Mac, nor is there any reference to it in the Help files. But with the addition of the Find My Mac feature, now freely available via iCloud, a Mac can securely erase a drive in a fashion quite similar to that of the iPhone. Find My Mac allows Mac users to remotely locate and lock, send messages and alert sounds to, and — most important for our purposes — wipe a lost Mac. Of course, this functionality works perfectly well with Macs that aren’t lost as well.

Sending the “Wipe” command to your Mac from Find My Mac (either via a browser logged in to iCloud or from Find My iPhone on your iPhone) will do the same thing to your Mac that Secure Erase does on your iPhone. It will erase the encryption key that protects the data on your SSD.

“The Remote Wipe command is, of course, a last resort, as it instantly destroys the boot drive’s contents by erasing the encrypted volume’s key, rendering the drive’s contents unusable.“

This means that, once the encryption key is deleted, even you will no longer be able to access your data with your password. Once this happens, the only way to access the data is to decrypt it, and without the key, this is a monumental task far beyond the capabilities of most users. The XTS-AES 128 bit encryption that Lion uses is extremely difficult and time consuming to crack. In fact, though there are more secure options out there, I believe this one has yet to be cracked at this point.

Also, once the encryption key is wiped, the wipe command apparently goes through and deletes all the data as well:

“Instant wipe removes the encryption key from your Mac — making the data completely inaccessible — then proceeds with a thorough wipe of all data from the disk.“

It’s unclear exactly how this wipe is performed. Does it happen at the hardware level clearing data from each and every cell of the SSD? Are the files overwritten multiple times with random data or are they just marked offline? It’s hard to tell from the scant online literature I’ve seen; even the developer docs seem to be out of date. But whatever the case, this is pretty durned good security for the average joe.

So, how to get all this working? There are only two things you need to set up: FileVault 2 and iCloud with Find My Mac

This article is already long enough, so I won’t go into FileVault 2 or iCloud setup here. They’re easy to do and there’s already plenty of information about the procedures. Here are some great links to get you started:
Set Up Filevault 2
Set Up iCloud’s Find My Mac

Suffice to say, once these services are configured, erasing your SSD, when the time comes, should be as simple as logging in to iCloud, locating the Mac in question using Find My Mac, and issuing the Wipe command. After a very short amount of time, the encryption key will be deleted, and some time later (how long depends on a number of variables, some of which we don’t actually know), your disk will, in theory, be wiped clean of data.

One caveat: I have yet to actually try the Wipe command. Oh, believe me, I intend to. But we’re talking about a day out of my life, and that’s a day I just don’t have to spare. And you know what they say about good intentions. Yeah.

If I do manage to get around to this, I’ll certainly post my findings here. I encourage others to do likewise in the comments section of this article.

MORE:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Disk_Encryption

While I’m nowhere near ready to publish, I’m nevertheless understandably interested in digital publishing options. The ePub format is how I’ve envisioned digitally publishing my book thus far, but iBooks Author offers a whole new wrinkle.

The iBooks Author Format
Like a lot of folks, I was a bit irked when I heard that iBooks Author creates files in a proprietary format only accessible to iOS. It would certainly have been possible for Apple to make iBooks Author create standard ePub formatted content. And that would be nice, but the more I look at the tools, the more I realize that using the ePub format would completely miss the point of this platform. What Apple is trying to do here is change the standard. In the same way they want to revolutionize the world of textbooks, Apple wants to change the way books are made and read. By making them interactive. This is clearly the goal for iBooks Author. Sure, you can make non-interactive books with it, but that misses the point entirely. iBooks Author makes something no other tool can make. And that something is made to run on an iPad.

iBooks Author Beefs
You may note that I said iPad in that last sentence. That was no mistake. From what I can tell, iBooks Author content is not just iOS only, it’s iPad only. The Textbook category doesn’t even show up in iBooks on the iPhone. Nor can you export from iBooks Author to iPhone. In fact, it’s so iPad-centric that even vertical and horizontal orientation are authored for different appearances and behaviors. That’s right, a horizontally held iBooks Author product will appear and behave differently than a vertically help one. The iPhone doesn’t do this. This is pure iPad, folks.

There are two reasons I put this in the “Beefs” category. The first is that, well, I don’t have an iPad, so I have no real way to play with the full iBooks Authoring process. I hope to have this issue corrected eventually, when I finally do end up getting an iPad. I can tell you, iBooks Author is one more reason to do so, and I can see getting one soon.

The other reason is that, somewhat oddly, portrait mode seems to be geared toward reading text. In this mode, text dominates the page and images and other media are added to the sidebar. Tap one of these sidebar items and you’ll see the full-screen version, but this layout does not work well for making comics, which are single images on a vertical page. This may make iBooks Author less than ideal for making traditional comics digitally. (And actually, I should point out, making a traditional e-book from a comic is probably the easiest kind of book you can make.) To further illustrate iBooks Author’s landscape-centricity, there’s even a setting to disallow vertical orientation. But not the other way around.

But this just underscores the point I’m trying to make about iBooks Author. iBooks Author is not about making traditional books. It’s about making something new, something specific to the iPad, a new reading experience entirely. One that’s rich and interactive. And that’s got me thinking about my book in new ways.

iBooks Author Coolness
What ultimately is cool about iBooks Author is this: If you think about it, it’s a lot more than just a textbook creation tool, or even just a book creation tool; it’s essentially a media wrapper for building simple interactives for iPad. The confusion comes from the name. iBooks Author creates books, right? But again I say, Apple wants us to re-envision the book. This is a book in name only. And this new book lies somewhere between book and application.

What these “books” remind me of more than anything else are the interactive kiosks we have here at the museum. These interactive screens aim to educate and entertain simultaneously by creating an engaging personal experience. The visitor chooses and interacts with the content. They have a certain level of control and agency not afforded by static displays, nor by straight video. And I believe this approach, when done well, can encourage learning.

Using iBooks Author
iBooks Author is very much in the iWork vein. In fact, using it is very, very similar to using Keynote. Keynote projects — as well as Word docs and Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets, for that matter — can even be embedded right into iBooks Author projects. Essentially, as in Keynote, you have an outline on the left and a viewer in the center where you add and modify text and other media. Perhaps the biggest difference is that you’ll be authoring in iBooks Author for both vertical and horizontal views. But otherwise, it’s very similar.

Conclusion
I have high hopes for iBooks Author. I actually see it as a way to make interactive content that goes far beyond our typical notions of what books are. I suspect  a lot of people will find a lot to like with this tool and the potentially magical things you can create with it with ease and simplicity.

via Ignore the Code

Unresponsiveness
Launch the Mac App Store and be prepared to wait. Wait while the app loads. Click on a link in the Mac App Store and be prepared to wait some more while whatever you clicked loads. Search for something in the App Store and… Well, you get the idea. I typically wait anywhere from 3 to 10 — you heard me, 10! — seconds for the App Store to fully load on launch. On a new MacBook Pro with 8 Gigs of RAM, no less.

Uncommunicativeness
Not only will you wait after clicking a link, but there will be almost no indication that you’ve done anything at all. That’s right, during the wait time between clicking something and something actually happening, there will be very little to tell you that you’ve actually initiated an action. The only hint is a small throbber in the toolbar, and it doesn’t even always work.

Forgetfulness
Quit the Mac App Store and the next time you launch it it will not return you to your last visited page. No, instead you will see the Featured page, every time, even though Lion is supposed to remember the last state of apps, and even though App Store is a Mac app. This is not only annoying, it’s not conducive to shopping.

Unhelpfulness
The Mac App Store in general, in fact, doesn’t seem particularly conducive to anything but the most cursory and shallow of shopping endeavors. There is no way to look at more then one item at a time. There is no way to see a list of recently viewed items. There is no way to keep a list of items I’m interested in for perusal and possible purchase later. This is a piece of software that behaves very much like a browser, and, I believe, is even based on WebKit, but has no history or bookmarks. See something you like? Want to save it for later so you can shop around a bit or do some comparison shopping? Better get out a pen and some paper, ’cause this computerized shopping program can’t even make wish lists.

Unintentional Humor
I guess the final irony for me is this: How do you expect to sell software with such a shitty piece of software? That just seems like bad salesmanship.

This Lion-specific problem has a Lion-specific solution: boot from the Recovery Partition. Despite the fact that Lion’s ASR has been inexplicably hobbled, the Recovery Partition is quite full featured and provides many SysAdmin-friendly tools, including a full featured Terminal and ASR command.

Running ASR from the Recovery Partition allows you to unmount and, thus, block copy your boot partition without reaching for an external boot drive or DVD.

But here’s the grind: I’m not sure how you’re supposed to get the update.

My first attempt was via Software Update, but SU tells me I’m all up to date.

Next I tried the Mac App Store, where I met with what is becoming an all-too-frequently frustrating experience. Under the Purchased tab I see Final Cut Pro, and I’m given an option to Install.

But hitting Install gives me an error message telling me to use Software Update, which I already know doesn’t work.

After some option-click finagling I get App Store to allow me to attempt to install the update from the Final Cut Pro X product page, which currently lists the version as 10.0.1, the new version. But when I attempt to do so I get this message:

This is maybe the worst error message I’ve seen yet in the Mac App Store, because it shouldn’t even be possible. If I didn’t buy FCP from the Mac App Store, then where, pray tell did I buy it from? Are you accusing me of stealing it? Really? Because you should know better, shouldn’t you?

Isn’t this just the sort of licensing crap the App Store was supposed to do away with? Doesn’t the Mac App Store know exactly what I’ve bought and where? Seems to me like, once I’ve made the purchase, I should be able to reinstall FCP any time I want, and any version, even if I already have it. I don’t get why the App Store forbids re-installs.

Ultimately I was able to get the update. I did so by deleting the Final Cut Pro application from my Applications folder, then reinstalling it from the Mac App Store. Which, I say again, is just the sort of ridiculous user experience the App Store was supposed to prevent.

So far the Mac App Store user experience has been pretty terrible, particularly when installing Apple apps. This is in large part because, contrary to what they allow every other developer to do, Apple uses the App Store for large, complex application installs. Ironically, the most complex install yet, Mac OS X Lion, was their biggest success. But Xcode and now Final Cut Pro have been terrible. Just terrible.

Sloppy: Why Is The Header Not Centered?

Moreover, the App Store UI really needs and overhaul. It’s ugly, unbearably slow, cluttered and lacks features common to most browsers around today — features that would really aid the buying process, where their lack certainly hinders it. Features like tabs and bookmarks, for starters, would be really useful for comparison shopping. A shopping cart would be good for buying multiple items. Instead we’re stuck with this crap.

The Mac App Store is the single least Apple-like Apple product I’ve ever used. It’s kludgy and feels cheap. It’s just terrible. And it’s now been out for some time and is presumably mature as it’s now baked into the OS, so there’s no excuse for this. Unfortunately, for some products, it’s unavoidable, which is a real shame.

More and more I’m bothered by Apple’s tendency to force their vision on their customers. It was fine when they did so with wonderful products. but when the products suck, it becomes time to start looking for alternatives.

UPDATE:
I almost forgot! There are additional updates which bring additional inconsistencies to this update process. Compressor has also gotten an update, and this one can be had in the normal way, by simply hitting the Update button in the Updates section of the App Store (I presume the Motion update works similarly, but I don’t own it, so can’t say for sure).

But there are also CODEC updates, and these must be gotten via a webpage:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1396

So there are actually four different updates to the FCP suite, and three different ways to obtain the various components. None of which are Software Update, so none of which make the updates apparent to anyone who isn’t reading the trades. If you didn’t read Apple news sites, I’m not sure how you’d even find out about these updates.

The Software Update mechanism is a very good way to deliver updates — and vastly superior to the Mac App Store — but it’s been completely abandoned for the Final Cut Suite updates.

I’ve argued several times now that, as great as Google’s products are, they could be made even better if Google were to begin to concentrate even just a tiny fraction of its mighty will on the issue of design. And the new Google pages are distinctly better — nicer to look at and easier to use — than ever.

Mail and Calendar are most improved, but then perhaps they were the most in need of help. Both are now lighter and more spacious; colors have been muted, borders softened and emphasis placed in all the right spots. Both are easier to look at, and easier to read or just skim. Visually parsing the new interfaces for particular nuggets of information in the sea of crap that is my calendar and email is just plain easier.

The new interfaces look really nice too, at least to my eye, and that makes me want to look at them more, makes checking mail more of a pleasure, less of a chore.

By the way, if you want to see the new Gmail interface, you’ll need to apply one of the themes built special for the purpose. Just hit the Gear icon in the upper right, go to Settings and then Themes and select either “Preview” or “Preview (Dense)”.

I’m not a designer. I don’t know precisely how design works nor how to do it. But I am and admirer of good design, and I can certainly appreciate when it makes the tools we use work better.

It’s great to see Google embrace design in the manner.

Sachin Agarwal, who worked on the original Final Cut Pro, and then founded Posterous, flat out says yes:

“The pro market is too small for Apple to care about it. Instead of trying to get hundreds or even thousands of video professionals to buy new Macs, they can nail the pro-sumer market and sell to hundreds of thousands of hobbyists like me.”

Gruber tends to agree, but seems to think that eventually Final Cut Pro X will meet the needs of professionals:

“I think Apple plans for Final Cut Pro X to grow from where it is today to eventually meet the needs of high-end pros. What this release shows is not that Apple doesn’t care about the pro market at all, but rather that they don’t care enough to prevent Apple from releasing a version that pros can’t yet use.”

Ken Segall says Apple isn’t abandoning Pros, they’re just redefining the meaning of the term Pro:

“Because Apple isn’t actually abandoning the Pros. They’re simply redefining what the word Pro means. FCPX is only the most recent indicator.”

Of course, what he really means is that Apple is redefining what the term Pro means in their marketing materials. Pros themselves haven’t changed, can’t be redefined by Apple and continue to have certain needs that Apple is less and less willing to meet. By redefining Pro for themselves, Apple is effectively abandoning actual creative professionals.

Which neatly explains why non-professional editors like Agarwal like Final Cut Pro X, but Pros still don’t. Or more accurately, it neatly explains why Apple had the balls to keep Pro in the name:

“In the world of Apple, a Pro product used to mean ‘designed for high-end professionals with needs far beyond those of mortal men.’ Now it simply means ‘the high-performance model.’”

So don’t let the name deceive you. Final Cut Pro X is not built for professionals.

UPDATE:
Matthew Levie, professional film and video editor, is doing a whole series of posts for TUAW breaking down what it’s like to actually use FCPX. It’s quite good and a very illuminating look into both the good and bad aspect of the software from a pro’s point of view. And I like that it spans multiple days and attempts to use the software, because I think that is what learning software is really like. It’s also mercifully brief and to the point.

Gradually, that became less and less true. Over that decade I’d continued to use Final Cut extensively, and even taught a beginner’s course in it for several years. But as the industry changed in monumental ways, particularly with the move to HD production, and Final Cut lagged behind trends and technological advances and stuck with the same tired paradigms, I grew increasingly frustrated with the application. Eventually I stopped using Final Cut and stopped making videos. I often wonder if part of the reason for quitting was that the tools had become such a burden to me.

I haven’t made a video in a couple of years now, but when Final Cut Pro X was announced I was really excited to hear it. Excited in the way you are when you see an old friend from college and they’ve just gotten a makeover. Excited in that, “God, Final Cut, it’s been ages! You look great!” kind of way. It’s not that I have any genuine interest in rekindling the friendship, I’ve moved on with my life. But it’s heartening to see an old friend with a new spring in his step.

Unfortunately, the makeover seems to have included a lobotomy.

Sources of Information
An insane amount has already been written about this release, and I don’t want to rehash much. So I’ll start by just listing what I’ve read so far, because it informs where I’m coming from. I also think these are really good sources for folks who want to learn more.

Macworld First Look
Macworld Opinion
Ken Stone First Look
Phillip Hodgetts Unanswered Questions
John Gruber’s Take

David Pogue’s Takes 1 Through 3
Take 1
Take 2
Take 3

Jeffrey Harrell’s Takes
This one’s really good, but you know what, just read the whole fucking blog, it’s all FCPX stuff, and jeff Harrell is a terrifically entertaining writer.

Art Guglielmo’s Take
Creative Cow’s List of Missing Features
Ken Segall’s Take

Richard Harrington’s Response to David Pogue (Wow)

Trends
Right off the bat there is one very clear trend here: People who don’t edit video professionally seem to like Final Cut Pro X; professional video editors, on the other hand, tend to find this release largely unusable.

Another pretty obvious trend is the sheer amount of passion people feel about Final Cut Pro. I’m not alone in having such strong feelings; Final Cut Pro is — or at least was — an application that inspired fierce loyalty and admiration from its users, many of whom have relied on it for their livelihoods for over ten years. So there’s a crazy amount of writing being done about the new release.

The Good
Here’s just a quick list of some of the stuff they got right with FCPX.

• Performance is reportedly vastly improved with multi-core and GPU smarts.
• FCPX is 64bit and can now address a full compliment of RAM.
• Far less rendering is needed and most clips just play in realtime.
• Background rendering allows you to keep working while you render. Huzzah!
• Background import lets you edit while you ingest.
• Revamped interface makes certain common operation quicker and easier.

The Bad
And here’s some of the good stuff they omitted or just simply gutted.

• No XML, OMF or EDL exports.
• No way to open projects created in prior version.
• No way to buy the previous version.
• No way to organize media outside of keywords and Events.
• No video reference monitor support.
• No support for Photoshop layers.
• No tracks.
• Almost no tape support — only DV and HDV are supported.
• No RED Camera support (which I thought was half the point of this release).
• All available media (even that of competing clients, for instance) appears in the interface at all times.
• No multi-camera editing.

So you can see there’s a lot of good stuff there. Stuff that FCP users have wanted for a long, long time. Stuff to make you work faster, smarter, more efficiently. But it’s all completely mitigated by the huge list of drawbacks, many of which are non-starters for Pro editors. In fact it seems like every feature Apple threw out of FCPX was something Pros — and perhaps only Pros — really needed. But the thing is, they really needed it.

Some Thoughts
After reading everything I can about how FCPX works, there are three major points that come to my mind. The first is about the software itself: It seems to me that what Final Cut used to be — what made it such a good tool — was that it was flexible. You could do things many different ways, and you could set it up in a way that suited you. One of the biggest problems with version X seems to be that it is inflexible, that you must bend to its will, to its way of thinking. That’s a step backwards.

The second thought is about the development of the software: It almost seems as if Apple developed FCPX in a complete and utter vacuum. It’s as if they never once consulted a single professional editor. The implications of this are truly frightening.

And this inevitably leads me to my third major thought, the thought I can no longer avoid, the one about the very core of Apple as a company: Is Apple abandoning the Pro market?

Communication
Apple may be a secretive company, but I believe they communicate in subtle ways the direction their products are headed by the focus they give those products. I continue to believe, for instance, that the design of the iPad communicates that it is a product more for the consuming of media than for the creation of media, and thus far the app ecosystem we’ve seen grow up around this platform has largely shown that to be the case. Sure, you can make stuff on an iPad, but that’s not really its intended primary function. That’s not its specialty, at least not in its current incarnation.

So let’s look at Final Cut Pro X and see if we can’t glean some similar conclusions from its interface. And to do that, let’s look at the fundamental organizing principle around which FCPX is based: The Event.

The Meaning of The Event
The concept around which clip organization is meant to occur in FCPX is that of The Event. Each time you import footage it creates Events out of the import, placing each import into some kind of chronological order (just like in iPhoto, for instance). This is great, and really smart if you’re shooting home videos; you tend to organize them chronologically in your mind anyway, so it’s a logical way to order your videos in a project.

But if you come from professional video and film, you’ll immediately see the flaw in the thinking here. The notion that a production is organized this way is completely and utterly wrong, and based entirely in the world of home movies, the world of the consumer. Feature films are shot in order of convenience — almost always out of sequence, not chronologically — so organizing by Events is anathema to the world of professional film and video.

If you view the things that Apple makes as a sort of body language of the company, it starts to look very much like Final Cut Pro X is telling us something very loudly and very clearly: This is not software for professionals.

Couple the release of FCPX with other recent recent Apple trends — the discontinuation of XSAN and Xserve, the price drop and likely lack of development of Mac OS X Server and the lackluster recent Mac Pro builds — and if you’re any kind of Apple Professional, you’ll start to get worried. Apple is beginning to look very much like a company that’s moving away from what was once its base, creative professionals, and exclusively towards the consumer masses.

Conclusion
Final Cut Pro X seems like a step backwards for the venerable editing suite we’ve all come to love over the past decade, feature-wise to be sure, but also philosophically. Maybe it will quickly become more capable and flexible, maybe the real deal-breakers will get addressed, and maybe it will all turn out groovy in the end. Maybe Apple will ultimately listen to its professional customers, though they don’t seem to have even consulted them in the first place. It’s hard to tell sometimes with such a complete overhaul what the future holds.

But you may not want to hold your breath. Final Cut Pro X really seems to me like another, rather loud signal from Apple to the professional world that they’re done providing us with the best software and hardware around, and that their only real focus going forward will be the average computer user, the consumer. iPhones and iPads for everyone!

Apple used to care deeply about the Pro market, because it was the Pros that gave them so much good press, so much visibility. It was the Pros that really supported Apple, particularly behind the scenes, via word of mouth. Apple made the cool Pro kit, and the Pros went around and told all their friends about Apple, showed it off. The Pros contributed a great deal towards Apple’s mindshare. But now that Apple has managed to tap into the consumer psyche in a large and extremely profitable way, they seem to care less and less about their bread and butter for the last 20 years, creative professionals. Final Cut Pro X is the most definitive statement of that attitude I’ve seen to date. As someone who’s based his career to a great degree on Apple hardware and software, it makes me sad.