Final Cut Pro X Released

in , , ,

Well. The day is finally here. Final Cut Pro X has been released. Already announced back in the spring, but just to reiterate the price has been cut from $999 to $299, a move that is sure to make Avid and Adobe nervous. You can buy it on the Mac App Store, right now. While no full featured reviews are out yet, Macworld has had an early release version for the past week or so and their excellent video guy Gary Adcock has written a first-look about the new application:

Apple has revamped Final Cut Pro's hands-on user experience in three major areas: Editing, media organization, and post-production workflow. New tools such as the Magnetic Timeline, Clip Connections, Compound Clips, and Auditions provide a smooth, intuitive editing experience. With the rise of data-centric workflows and tapeless video recording, organizational tools such as Content Auto-Analysis, Range-based keywords, and Smart Collections work in the background to automate formerly tedious and time-consuming manual processes. Post production workflows now offer customizable effects, integrated audio editing, color grading, and a host of streamlined delivery options.

The Price Of "Free"

in , , , , ,

Richard Muscat, writing at Serious Simplicity:

My contention is that “Free” as described and used in many contemporary web-based businesses is a non-business model that is not only broken, but actively harmful to entrepreneurship. Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles. I think this piece hits it out of the park. Why should you price your product as a pay-for-service or good? This article lays out all of the reasons and why free should never be your decision.

Tweetmarks

in , , ,

Tweetmarks:

Tweetmarks is a web service for setting and getting the "last read" tweet for a given Twitter user. It can be used to "sync" the reading position between multiple Twitter clients and platforms. It was created by Riverfold Software. Also see this blog post introducing the service. All Twitter client application developers: PLEASE integrate this into your clients. As for why Twitter hasn't already implemented this themselves, Marco Arment writes: Unfortunately, I doubt that Twitter’s official Mac and iOS apps will. Twitter has decided, for whatever reason, not to do this to date. I heard a while back that this was because they want people to just read what’s there now, like a river of news, not to try to “keep up” with a potentially insurmountable timeline. They didn’t want to encourage features like this that would allow someone to know how far “behind” they are, because that could cause guilt and feelings of information overload, which could discourage usage. I believe they are wrong in this line of thinking. Moving from Tweetbot on my iPhone to Twitteriffic on my iPad to the Twitter app on my Mac feels like a broken experience. Having to re-read supposed "new" updated over again to figure out my place depending on where I am just feels wrong. Twitter is arrogant in trying to dictate how users should use their service rather than trying to accommodate the reality of how their users currently use Twitter. To quote Marco again: And as long as Twitter doesn’t have an API for it, widespread Tweetmarks support in apps is badly needed for anyone who uses multiple Twitter clients. So if you make a Twitter client, please add Tweetmarks support. Yes, please.

Apple Announces iWork for iPhone and iPod Touch

in ,

Apple PR:> Apple today announced that its groundbreaking iWork productivity apps, Keynote, Pages and Numbers, are now available for iPhone and iPod touch, as well as iPad. If you already own any of the iWork apps, Pages, Keynote, or Numbers, then you'll get the iPhone versions for free, as Apple has made these universal apps. Also why announce this today, one week ahead of WWDC, when they could be included in the keynote? The keynote has more important things to cover. This is small fry.

A Programmer Explains Why Android Apps Are Ugly

in , ,

Christopher Mims, at technology review writes about developing for Android devices:

Developing for such a wide array of device screen sizes and aspect rations means that not only is it impossible to create pixel-perfect designs for Android interfaces, there isn’t even any guarantee that a given interface can be scaled to fit a particular screen. And in case you missed it, you should read this article that made the rounds a few days ago as well.