I suppose this should go in with the earlier “Pictures” and “Words” posts, but I only thought to experiment with it today. Here’s a very uninteresting video of me playing the “Capricho arabe” by Tarrega. Almost everything is wrong here:

1. •Left and right are reversed—what’s up with that?
   

2. •You can hear hail and rain, starting a few seconds in
   

3. •A loud, unpleasant electronic hum starts about 2/3 of the way through
   

4. •Tiny laptop microphone sounds like crap
   

5. •Terrible lighting
   

6. •I carry all my tension in my jaw, and it’s visible
   

7. •The framing is all wrong, so you can’t see most of the hand action
   

8. •Etc.
   

Working with the new iMovie is in fact a bizarre, Windows-like, counter-intuitive pain, much as I had read. I’m really surprised. It is fast, I’ll give it that, but fast means nothing when it takes you an hour to figure out how to move your “video source” materials into the “clips” window (answer: a small button with no label in the middle of the toolbar—and no pop up info window on that guy to help you; the icon on the button is—well, take a look:

A star on a folded piece of paper with an arrow pointing to it. That’s seriously f**ked up, if I may be so bold. Why? Because it merges two standard icons used throughout the OS that have no relation whatsoever to what it actually does (the folded paper is the standard “text document” icon, and the anything with a curled arrow pointing to it is the standard “alias” icon), and then it adds a third, random element of a shooting star. Coming out its ass, as far as I’m concerned. As far as I know, this violates every one of Apples human interface guidelines: you can’t, say, drag something from the “source material” window to the “clips” window! Oh goodness, no! You can’t move it via a contextual menu (right click for you Windows user out there), either. Instead, you have press an unlabeled button with no help dialogue, a button that seems to suggest that if you press it, you will become a star. Or maybe that your movie will become a text document, or rather, an alias of a text document. “Press this button to turn your hard work into an alias of a Word document that will have a picture of a star on it.”

So, iMovie is actually rather painful to work with it: don’t ask me what those stars next to that button do, either. Filled star, empty star, X. This might as well be written in Linear B. No clue.

I hope I’ve lowered your expectations sufficiently now:

I’ll see I can’t do more justice to this piece in another post. And work out some of the glitches, too!