Attention: We are retiring the ASP.NET Community Blogs. Learn more >

Getting sucked into Apple culture

They opened up an Apple store here in the Greater Cleveland area, in a real trendy area on the east side in a trendy new outdoor mall. Make no mistake... I am a devout iPod user and there are more than 100 songs so far from the iTunes music store on the little guy.

I really dig Apple's stuff, and I always have. That's a funny thing when you're a .NET developer, but it's hard not fall in love with the hardware and OS X. Even free stuff on OS X has better UI than Windows stuff.

My latest fascination is with Final Cut Pro. My background prior to writing code was in radio and TV. At my last TV job, for a city and school district, I convinced the powers that be to let me buy a $20,000 Mac-based Media 100 system, one of the early pioneers in non-linear editing, second only to Avid at the time. It changed everything for me because I had been cutting tape for years prior to that. It was this amazing creative freedom.

I still miss the toys, and my desire to write a screenplay and make a film has me interested again. I currently have the Windows version of Avid Xpress Pro and it's not bad. It's more or less the same UI that you'll find in the more expensive Avid systems that most feature films are cut with. But Final cut looks so much more clean and damn impressive on one of those giant cinema screens that Apple makes.

So today at the Apple store I got to play with Final Cut a little. Clearly they learned some things from Avid and Media 100, and there were a lot of striking similarities. For example, it was obvious to me how to “patch” audio tracks from the source clip to other tracks on the timeline.

The store itself was bright, clean, and slightly creepy in that respect. The people working there were the “alt” types of course, including this cute girl who knew her stuff better than any socially-challenged nerd at CompUSA.

My wife, Stephanie, ordered an iBook last week and it should arrive later this week. I'm kind of excited to play with it. It's perfect for her because it's small and portable, yet functional (in the Windows world, Sony gets small but not functional).

Even if Steve Jobs doesn't always make the best business decisions, you can't help but admire the culture the product creates. It's good stuff, and even as a .NET developer I'm not too proud to admit that.

3 Comments

  • My favorite Windows-based video editing software is Vegas Video by Sonic Foundry/Sony. It's by far better than anything else I've seen.



    On the bottom of my list would be Adobe Premiere... not sure why everybody likes that one so much.

  • Agreed. Permier exists only because people like Photoshop and it's cheap, relatively speaking.



    Vegas is pretty good stuff. Not as clean as Avid, Media 100 or Final Cut, but good stuff.

  • We've got two Avid editors at school - a G5 and a G4. The person that does our video editing is going to show me how to use one of them this week - looks pretty intuitive from what I've watched. Hope this is actually the case.

Comments have been disabled for this content.