thomas fitzgerald.net

There has been this rumor floating around for the past couple of months that Apple is planning to sell off its Pro Apps devision, namely Final Cut studio and Aperture. The rumor was dying down but then Robert Cringly over at PBS posted a fanciful story that Apple was planning to sell its pro apps so it could buy Adobe. Of course the idea that they need to ditch their own Applications to make way for Adobe’s is completely ridiculous. It’s doubtful if Apple could afford to buy Adobe even if it wanted to, and Apple’s competing Apps are, for the most part better than the Adobe Counterparts. Having said that I do think here could be benefits for both consumers and Apple if they did buy Adobe (putting an end to Adobe’s insane overseas pricing would be one benefit). I consider it unlikely but not totally beyond the realms of possibility. What is completely beyond the realms of possibility though is the idea that Apple plans to sell off its pro apps.

This all started when Apple announced that they weren’t going to be exhibiting at NAB this year. This sparked immediate and rampant speculation as to their motives. As I work in the Television post production Industry I have first hand experience of it. After the announcement I was having discussions with some of the people I know who work in the industry and the first chicken little reaction was that they must be planning to ditch Final Cut Pro so they can focus on the iPhone. (The iPhone pretty much gets the blame for everything these days) Of course it’s complete nonsense as they are two completely separate and independent devisions within Apple. Anyway, I’m sure discussions like this were being held by post production professionals across the globe. That in itself would have been enough to start the ball rolling, but then take those same professionals, and have them all congregate in Las Vegas under the one roof for a week and rampant speculation quickly becomes a rumor. All it takes is one person in that situation to make the jump from “I wonder are Apple selling off their pro apps” to “I heard that Apple are selling off their Pro Apps” in a hot convention center with several thousand video nerds and you have an instant scandal.

Such was the furor over this that Apple came out and firmly denied that this was to be the case. Mind you that didn’t stop Robert Cringly publishing his piece and multiple sites picking up his speculation and translating it to potential fact. This isn’t the first time this kind of water cooler chatter got out of hand about Apple either. Thanks to a wonderfully bad piece of attempted journalism by the now dead Think Secret, people had pronounced Aperture end of life and there were “rumors” that Apple was going to kill the project. Anyway, you can rest assured that with Final Cut pro’s 44% market share it’s not going to happen.

So why weren’t they at NAB this year and why has there been no major Final Cut updates considering they usually release a relatively big upgrade at NAB every year? I have a pretty good idea as to what’s going on, and the inspiration came, ironically enough from Adobe. When they made their stark warning at Photoshop World recently that they would need to migrate Photoshop’s code from carbon to cocoa in order to take the application to 64bit I realized that Apple was faced with the same dilemma. Final Cut Pro started out as an OS9 Application and has been building on that legacy code ever since. It’s actually pretty inefficient by todays standards too (for example it barely uses multiple processors), and it was only a matter of time before they would have to do a major re-write. Why now though you ask? Well, there is a growing trend in the high end of the industry towards 2K and 4K post production. This is basically even higher resolution than high definition and is used for cinema post production. Cameras like the Red One are pushing this way of working forward into the mainstream and because of the huge file sizes involved I suspect than in order to work efficiently Apple needs to go 64bit with Final Cut Pro.

The reason the weren’t at NAB was simply that they didn’t have anything to show this year. Their main competitor, Avid, was not there and it costs a lot of money to have a space as large as Apple’s usual booth so why waste the money when you’ve got nothing to show. From what I’ve heard from people at the show they might as well have been there anyway considering the amount of other booths showing Final Cut or using Apple technology.

So the upshot of all this is that there is no great conspiracy in action here. Apple is not selling their Pro Applications. Final Cut is not going away. the sky is not falling and the iPhone is not the root of all evil. Rest assured that if they are re-writing Final Cut the end result will be even better than ever. And still way better than Premiere.

[update: Added link to Apple’s denial of the rumors]

[UPDATE: Fixed Broken Links]

From Macworld UK:

Apple has moved to dismiss rumours that it plans to abandon its video products.

These rumours first emerged when the company confirmed it had no plans to exhibit at NAB. But the rumours are false, said Richard Townhill, Apple’s director of marketing for professional video applications.

He also announced that they’ve sold their 1 millionth copy of Final Cut Pro and now own 49% of the professional video editing market, which is pretty damn impressive considering how entrenched Avid was not too long ago.
[Read Apple committed to Final Cut - ProCreative - Macworld UK]

From Wired:

Apple has since made a small concession, changing the way its Software Update application for Windows looks. Software Update will still push any Apple software you don’t have installed, however, the new programs are no longer listed as “updates,” but appear in a separate pane clearly labeled “New Software.”

[Read Apple Backs Off Slightly on Aggressive Software Update Tactics | Compiler from Wired.com]

I’ve played around with iWeb several times since it first came out, but I never really gave it much thought, as it always seemed pretty limited for what I wanted it to do. Recently however I was having a conversation with a friend who showed me some of the things they were doing with it and I was pretty impressed. So I decided to give it a second chance and have a good, deep exploration of the software’s capabilities. I have to say, I was really impressed with what I found. But this is not a review, because there are plenty of those around the internet already, instead I’d like to discuss what I think iWeb could be, because iWeb has, in my opinion huge potential. There is nothing really like it on any platform from what I can see, yet it is limited, partly for the audience it is aimed at. But with maybe 10 percent more functionality, iWeb could be 100 percent more useful. With that in mind, rather than cannibalize the iLife suite, I think Apple could really shake the web design market up if they came out with a professional version of iWeb.

There are plenty of visual web editors out there, and many offer significantly more functionality than iWeb, but none offer the same kind of features iWeb has. Take adding pictures to a page for example. You can quickly add picture frames, position them anywhere, scale and rotate, have drag and drop replacements all with relative ease. Programs like Softpress Freeway allow you to visually lay out your page, but to do what you can do in iWeb you’d need to prep everything in Photoshop first, and then changes would be a pain. [UPDATE: Certainly Applications like Freeway allow you to import images and graphics of any kind into the software, but what I am referring to is the way iWeb comes with templates and drop zones for various items, such as the cool picture frames, where you can just drag and drop into the drop zone to replace an image, or the way it generates gallery links for photo pages automatically. This is a great timesaver and really flexible. You could certainly do this in other software but it would require more work. The way iWeb does this (and Dvd studio pro too) is just brilliant]

With iWeb it’s so simple to create visually powerful layouts in minutes an yet some simple things are equally frustrating, such as changing the width of your site. To do this you have to edit every new page, and then things don’t flow properly so you have to go change that, and there is no way to do this on a master basis.

If you look at some of Apple’s other Applications though, you can see some ideas that would work really well with iWeb. Take keynote for example. It’s ability to create and edit master pages would make iWeb considerably more useful. If you could edit the master pages of themes, it would be so much easier to create customized sites. Another similar paradigm is DVD Studio Pro. It’s menu layout system has some neat features that would greatly enhance a professional version of iWeb, such as the ability to store libraries of custom styles for buttons, text etc.As I said, I don’t think it would actually require that much as Apple has most of the technology in its other software, it’s just a matter of rolling it into a new package. (And yes, I know that’s not as easy as It sounds)

So here is a list of 10 things I think iWeb Pro, for want of a better name could have to make it a powerful entry into the web design field:

1. Ability to edit master pages and templates like Keynote. SO for example you can select a theme and then edit the master pages that make up that theme so that any new pages you create will be based on your modified masters. Also, you should have the ability to save your changes as a new theme.

2. Ability to make site wide styles and changes that affect your entire site. Much like working with CSS in traditional web design

3. Come with a library of objects and images, much like DVD studio Pro, SoundTrack pro, Motion etc.

4. Ability to create custom libraries of Button Styles, Layouts, Text Styles etc, in the same way you can with DVD Studio Pro.

5. Built in FTP Client.

6. More pre-defined web widgets

7. Plug in Architecture for web widgets, much like the way wordpress widgets work

8. On Screen rulers and grids and (non dynamic) guides for precision layouts

9. Some kind of support for server based blogging, in other words, you’re not limited to updating your blog through iWeb

10. Support for dynamic and animated elements, even if it’s just basic custom roll overs, or menu effects.

So there you have it. I don’t think any of this is too ambitious or too much to ask for, but you could end up with a pretty powerful web design system that fills a badly needed hole in the current line up of web design tools. I for one would buy it in a heart beat. In the mean time I’m going back to seeing how far i can push iWeb.

[UPDATE 2: In response to the comment below, I don’t mean to take away from other Web Development packages such as Freeway, Dreamweaver or Golive. All are great packages. I think iWeb’s way of doing things is uniquely Apple, that it would be great if it just past some of it’s limitations to attract a wider audience.]

Looks like I’m not the only one experiencing the black image of death problem I mentioned earlier.