Posts Tagged Apple
Apple’s Magic Mouse: The Wrong Direction Forward
Posted by Ben in Mac, Peripherals on October 27, 2009
Seen above, Apple's new Magic Mouse literally has no buttons, as the front acts as one big track pad.
When Apple released a slew of new products, coincidentally 2 days before the launch of Windows 7, one of the rather interesting products hitting shelves was Apple’s new Magic Mouse. An “improvement” from the previous Mighty Mouse, this new device is much thinner, sits lower to the ground, has Bluetooth connectivity, and has no buttons. You heard me, no physical buttons at all. The real catch is that the whole front of the mouse is a giant track-pad, capable of multi-touch gestures. While I do find this an advancement to the current form of computer interaction, I believe we are not headed in the right direction when it comes to this technology.
The mouse has been in the market for a half century and up until recently with touch-screen tablets and computers, its been the only form of interaction. While it is powerful and flexible, its just too limited. One pair of coordinate points is all that can be used at any given second, greatly reducing possibly productivity. As the market has shown, multi-touch is the next generation of interaction technology, but in what other ways can we talk to our computers?
Its the question that must be answered in the coming years as new products like the “Magic Mouse”, though putting us ahead, only drop us farther behind in the pursuit of new and greater technologies. When you consider a form of interaction, the click-wheel featured on an iPod is a popular one, and with that, I have no doubt in my mind that Apple has the ability to pave the trail of advancement in the development of the next great form of interaction with our everyday computers. It’s a technology that is not questioned often, but as we push further into the future, the mouse will not work.
iMovie 09 “Save” Function Missing
Apple's latest installment of the iMovie family left many dissatisfied as the ability to downgrade to iMovie HD from iLife 09 was dropped.
I have my own fair share of rants about Windows computers, but I notice that I do tend to have more positive comments to the Mac I have. Well it wasn’t until this weekend, when I actually opened up iMovie ‘09 for the first time, that I realized the one major flaw it has. I have never used any previous versions of iMovie, but I did hear that when Apple “completely redesigned” iMovie ‘08, it was so different that Apple actually let users downgrade for free. For me, I hoped that the 2009 version would have fixed what was wrong, because they did drop there support for free downgrading with iLife ‘09.
Well, it was a good 4 hours later when I had finally finished my first very important video. The program had run smooth and steady the whole time, even with constant video adding, editing, etc. But when I started it from the top to quickly review my production without rendering it, iMovie decided to “unexpectedly quit”. And it wasn’t until I reopened the program that I learned that iMovie ’09s claimed Auto-Save is all but real. Don’t get me wrong, the video clips I have imported were there, but the hours upon hours of work putting them together meticulously was not there.
In my conclusion, I’ll let you know in the process of creating over 5 short-films, iMovie crashed a total of 12 times for me, all for unexpected reasons. So I just have to ask Apple why. Being honest, the program and its abilities are just shy of professional video editing software, but the fact that I cannot manually go to: File > Save, to keep my progress every now and then is flat out ridiculous. If there’s one thing that needs to be in iMovie ‘10, it better be the ability to save, cause it sure isn’t there.
I’ve yet to discover a work-around even after reading elsewhere that you can manually save the file via drag and drop through the finder, but that is not the case. I’ll let you know if I ever figure this out. Leave a comment if you think you’ve figured out how to fix this, cause I know I’m not the only one!