In addition to playing with iMovie 08 and some of the family video, I also used it to upload the screencasts to a YouTube Channel which you can find right here. It was very easy and I’m wondering why I never did this earlier.
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The new iMovie really has some people up in arms. I’m not sure if it is just a vocal minority or Apple’s got everyone mad. What happened is Apple dumbed it down. Gone is the timeline as well as several other tools. In is a really cool skimming feature and much simpler formatting and transitions.
So, I’ve been reading about all these rants and decided to give it a try. I had about 20 minutes of miscelaneous footage on my hard drive taken with the video function of my point-and-shoot Kodak that I haven’t gotten around to processing in Final Cut because I just haven’t had time. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to try this new “controversial” software.
I didn’t crack the manual and just went for it. Importing the video was easy but time consuming. The program builds that skim library for you so it spends a little while chuging through. Rather than watch it go through that process, I had every intention of catching up on email but instead ended up playing frisbee with the neighbor’s dog.
I came back about 15 minutes later and it was done. I don’t know how long it took, but it was done. Then it was really easy. You scan the clips and drag the mouse to select the portion you want to use. You then drag the selected clip into your project. You can drop in transitions, titles, and music very easily. Frankly, I can’t get over how quick and easy it was.
With about 10 minutes work, I had all the video cut down to a 7 minute funny clip with titles, transitions, and music. I then uploaded it to my .Mac account and had an email out to relatives across the US, London, and the Philippines. Apple, I get it.
For John Q Public, this program is excellent for getting video cut and completed with very little trouble. I also use Final Cut and I’m not willing to give up those extra tools but I also really like iMovie 08. If you want those extra tools you can still use iMovie 06, which remains availbable, but I recommend buying Final Cut Express. You get LiveType, Soundtrack, and all sorts of tools to unleash your inner Spielberg. The other nice thing about the new iMovie is you can export directly to Final Cut, which helps streamline my workflow for the serious stuff as well.
So at the end of the day, the new iMovie is a definite improvement in my video production. I appreciate the complainers, sort of. But with iMovie 06 still available, and the very powerful tools you can get with the $300 Final Cut Express, I also think they need to get over it.
There is a reason why I waited until last to do the review of Apple’s new spreadsheet program. I’ve never been very good at them. Frequently I find it useful to create little spreadsheets and graphs. My Excel sheets are generally pretty small. I’ve made more complex spreadsheets, but it usually seems more trouble than it is worth and, frankly, Excel is not always friendly to casual users.
So Apple now has a spreadsheet, Numbers, that is supposed to be “for the rest of us.” I decided to give it a try to see if it lives up to hype.
The first thing that strikes you with Numbers is the layout. All the spreadsheets I’ve used (even back to the DOS days) always had one sheet per page. That is the rule. Isn’t it? Who would think to put more than one sheet on a page and move them around willy-nilly? Well, apparently someone at Apple did. If you haven’t seen any of the screenshots on the web, Numbers allows you to make multiple sheets of various sizes and formatting and even graphic objects, text, and graphs on the same page. No longer does changing the column width for one data group muck it up for the other groups below. It is really convenient.
Not only does this make it easier to build a spreadsheet. It also makes it easier to print. You can move your elements around the page so you have them just the way you want. So many times I’ve had to fiddle with the column widths just for the sake of printing. With Numbers it is easy. Click and drag. It also previews your print so you can see exactly what you are printing.
The support for graphical objects, titles, and graphs is also very smooth. These features tie into the powerful OS X graphics features making drop shadows and other effects both familiar and good looking. Moreover, they move, resize and manipulate very easily.
The templates in Numbers are typical of Apple, clean and useful. For the lazy among us, the templates satisfy a lot of the typical uses for a spreadsheet: budgets, loans, investments and several other common uses. I can hardly wait to see what interesting templates the user community comes up with. The Numbers templates were so useful that it made me go back and look at the Excel templates to see if I was missing something. I wasn’t.
In terms of data input, I found it more intuitive than Excel. It self populates and generally could figure out what I was up to. The available formulas were not as extensive as those in Excel.
I liked the drag and drop calculations that allow you to quickly put together similar calculations of different data. I also really liked the custom cell formatting that lets you work with sliders and fixed intervals. The checkbox feature was also nice for my family budget. I can include and exclude certain lines with a simple check. I tried to find similar features in Excel, but couldn’t. It may be there, but simply beyond my paygrade. But that is the problem with Excel.
The only word I can use to describe the charts is “pretty”. Quite often my spreadsheet charts end up in a Keynote presentation or attached to a document. A lot of time my Excel charts end up looking like a train wreck. This isn’t really Microsoft’s fault but my own lack of subtlety. Thankfully Numbers’ default charts and colors look nice so long as I restrain myself from altering it too much. Like the formulas however, Excel has more variety in the types and formats of charts.
The Excel compatibility worked fine for me. I looked through my Excel files. Over the years I’ve prepared about seventy-five sheets for various work and personal projects. I loaded about twenty-five of them and they all seemed to work fine. A few times I got Apple’s little on-screen warning telling me where it had some heartburn over the conversion but it never seemed to make any difference. I also exported a few Numbers sheets to Excel. They didn’t look as nice, but also worked.
From reading the web I understand that the Excel compatibility isn’t perfect. There are quite a few formulas in Excel that Numbers doesn’t support. Also, thankfully in my opinion, Apple didn’t put macro support in. I think Apple probably put a lot of thought into Steve Jobs’ comment that Numbers is a spreadsheet “for the rest of us” because that is exactly what it is. I think the real high end macro jockeys should stick with Excel. If you need macros and some of those high end formulas, Excel is the only game in town. I doubt many Excel power users will be switching to Numbers. But then again, I also doubt Apple cares.
Regardless, I’ve found myself doing more complex spreadsheets with numbers than I ever did with Excel. Part of this may be my infatuation with this new spin on spreadsheets but part of this is also that it is just easier. It is for this reason that I can recommend iWork for the third straight week. If you have need of any of the iWork applications, the $79 is a no-brainer.
Author Steven Poole wrote a really nice piece about removing Microsoft Word from his hard drive that echoes many of my sentiments from my Pages review. Of note, he also mentions Scrivener which I am also a big fan of, but haven’t mentioned here because I intend to review it in the not so distant future.
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This was just too funny not too post.
There has been a brief hiatus in screencasts as a result of me having so much fun with the new iWork suite, vacation, and a lot of personal and professional commitments. Nevertheless, here is #6 in which I walk you through installation and set up of an excellent menubar clock/calendar replacement, MagiCal. Special thanks to Darren Rolfe at Macwingnut.com for helping me get the logo into a Final Cut friendly format. Enjoy!
You can Download it Directly Right Here
or better yet subscribe in the iTunes store
I read a little today about the current status of the iPhone hackers. Not the unlocking group. The ones that are making third party applications. It seems they are really making progress at making this doable even for us non unix-jockeys. They are past jailbreak now and have an application that just requires a few clickies to put third party apps on the phone and it goes and sniffs applications out for you. It sounds so easy I’m *thinking* about giving it a try. The problem is that I’m not reading about any third party apps that really motivate me to figure it all out. If they could get a mobile OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, and/or Yojimbo… now that would be a different story entirely.
Regardless, I could really care less about the whole “unlock” hubbub. I don’t need another phone company in my life. Phone companies generally act like mobsters. They take your money with little explanation and once in awhile (for good measure) they try to break your kneecaps. I understand about international users and some of the other reasons the unlocking helps a lot of folks out. To that extent I think it is great. I also think Apple really is not going to get its nose too far out of shape if people start buying their $600 phones to unlock somwhere else. AT&T, howver, will have kittens. Regardless, the unlock is pointless in my world. I need another phone account with someone else like a hole in the head.
I’ve added a new link to the reading list at right. DailyWritingTips is a site I found recently and it is very well done. If you spend much time behind a keyboard, it is really worth your time to check in every once in awhile. I’ve got it on my RSS feed list. I both enjoy and use the helpful tips.
Having just taken a small vacation and coming up two months of iPhone ownership, I thought I’d take a look at the web apps I routinely use on my iPhone. There are a lot of very nice iPhone web apps out there programmed by very bright and imaginative people. I’ve probably got about 50 of them linked on my “iPhone Applications” favorites bar but I’ve been making a conscious effort to track those applications that I actually use and thought I’d report on them here.
Not long after I switched, I went ahead and purchased a license for NetNewsWire which is an excellent news reading program loaded with features and constantly being refined by an active, committed Mac developer. It came with a free subscription to the NewsGator service which is an online reader component. It syncs with NetNewsWire and their iPhone app is really clean and easy to use. I toyed a bit with Google Reader which is free (that is always a good thing) but found the NewsGator/NetNewsWire combo easier for me to use.
Anyway I can check my subscriptions anytime on the iPhone and read through, trash, or clip for later viewing on my Mac very easily from anywhere (including the Edge network). This is my most frequently clicked iPhone web application.
I’ve previously blogged about how I use this simple online to-do application from 37Signals with its accompanying browser application for grown up computers to drive shopping lists and other to-do items between my iPhone and OmniFocus. It is free and Edge friendly. My good friend, Darren over at MacWingnut.com prefers todoist.com which is, frankly, much sexier in a geeky sort of way with gmail integration, quicksilver support and other things that sound fun but I like the simplicity of Tada. This is partly because I view it only as a stepping stone to getting tasks in my actual task vault, OmniFocus, wherein Darren (I believe) uses Todoist for the whole nine yards.
I am also trying 37Signals’ accompanying product BackPackit for a month to see if it is worth the trouble. This is sort a Kluge to get around the fact that Apple does not sync the Notes on my iPhone or give me a way to secure them. Ugh. I’ll report more on BackPackit at later date when I’ve had more time to work with it.
A necessity for living in Southern California. This is a great supplement to the little red lines I keep seeing in Google Maps.
This is a collection of all the various iPhone web applications that appears to be updated more than most and gives you a simple place to look for what is new.
There are others. Many, many others. But as pretty and neat as they look, I really don’t load them very often.
I am hoping Apple opens the iPhone up. If I could get an iPhone version of OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, and Yojimbo, I would be one very happy camper.
I was not a fan of Pages 06. I’m sure it was perfectly fine for making brochures and flyers, but unfortunately I never had much need for brochures and pamphlets so there it sat on my hard drive, unused and neglected. That being said, I wasn’t particularly happy with any other of the word processors on my Mac either. I played a bit with Bean and NeoOffice but when it came down to it, I usually ended up in Microsoft Word. Word reminds me of one of those RV’s you see driving down the road. The kind with bicycles tied on the back, a boat bolted to the roof, and spare luggage falling out the window. Like the old RV, Word has every possible feature bolted on and wedged into the various menus. While it has everything you could possibly need (and quite a few you will never need) it drinks system resources and is a real chore to use. Nevertheless, I, like many others, have been using Microsoft Word for more than 15 years and anything else I try will be compared to it.
So Steve Jobs announced the new Pages 08 and explained that now it is a word processor in addition to being a page layout tool. It is in this new word processing mode that I spent most of my time kicking the tires on Pages 08.
All word processors are fundamentally the same. From the days of my 8-bit Atari computer to sitting here with my fancy MacBook Pro, I still am forced to put the words together and get them onto the screen. When it comes to word processing, the devil is in details.
The details in Pages 08 are very nice indeed. There is a contextual format bar that monitors your activity and puts the applicable tools in easy reach. Whether you are typing text, working in a table, or inserting shapes and diagrams, Pages puts the related tools in the top bar.
Pages also incorporates several of the graphical tools added with iWork 08 to this Pages program. This allows for Instant alpha, customizable frames and other graphic tools. They work just as slick as in Keynote. I don’t think I’ll have a lot of need for these tools in a word processor but it is nice to know they are there.
Change tracking has also been added. This is a very important feature for my work. I often exchange documents with others where change tracking is critical. The implementation of change tracking in Pages is both easy and slick. Even more important, it has worked flawlessly with Microsoft Word. Since most of the people I am working with are using Word, this is critical.
Another new feature is automatic lists. This, of course, has been the bane of existence to all Microsoft Word users for years. Apple’s implementation of this feature is a bit more forgiving. It actually adopts your formatting instead of imposing its own. For instance if you type a number 1 and then period and two spaces, it will apply the same with the autoformatting.
The compatibility with Microsoft Word is generally good but not perfect. I put some format heavy contracts into it and made several adjustments while tracking changes. I then exported them to Word format and viewed them in Mac Word 04 and and Windows Office 2003. They looked fine and my windows colleagues were none the wiser. I also tried this with a legal pleading document and the conversion was a mess. Legal pleadings have a very specific format with lines down the left side, line numbering and a variety of other formatting requirements that don’t make a lot of sense but hey .. its the world I live in. Anyway, while the Word pleadings imported just fine into Pages, they did not export to Word properly after changes in Pages. The page formatting, font sizes, line numbering, and just about everything else were screwy and unusable without plenty of work. So for me that means I need to do pleading work in Word or just do it as a text file and send it to others for formatting.
Another issue I never quite sorted out was exporting to different versions of Word. Apple beat Microsoft to the punch with compatibility with Office 2007 but I don’t run Office 2007 so I can’t report on that issue. I tried to figure out if there is a setting to export to Office 2007 or Office 2003. Perhaps if I could sort that out it would solve the problem of exporting pleadings properly but after spending an hour trying to figure it out on the internet, I’m officially kerfluffled on that issue. In short, if you need to work with Word files and use complicated formatting make sure to give it a test run before you commit.
Pages 08 runs much cleaner than Microsoft Word in OS X. It loads quickly and happily exists far down in my activity monitor. As I typed this review in Pages, it ranged between one and ten percent of the total system resources. When I clicked out of Pages it pleasingly dropped to zero percent.
The included templates are very well designed and cover just about any need. It is telling of just how much of a stranglehold Microsoft has on the word processor market that my biggest problems with Pages are not its own feature set but its ability to play nicely with Word. Separating that issue, running Pages is easier and less intrusive than Word. It allows me to think less about the program and more about the words on the screen. While the feature set is more limited, it has everything I need. While Word still remains on my hard drive, I’m quite pleased to leave the Winnebago in the garage.
You can listen to this review on Surfbits MacReviewCast Episode #122.
