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Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

The cool part about iMovie and Garageband is they're basically a more approachable UI layer to Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. They share a lot of the same core code, and teach you the same concepts just without the fiddly pro bits.

I love that bifurcation because it really makes the pro apps more approachable without compromising their usefulness (pro apps require info density, consumer apps avoid it), and it allows their power be scaled down to iPhone and iPad.

I wish more software was made this way!

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As a longtime user of various pro apps in these categories - AE, Premiere, Final Cut, DVR, as well as ProTools, Digital Performer, Logic, etc, all of which share a lot of UX paradigms that make it relatively easy to switch between them, I find the type of simplification at work in iMovie and Garage Band makes them almost unrecognizable, stymieing my ability to use them at all almost every time I try.

I started in Sony Vegas back around the turn of the century and share your enjoyment of the standardized UI paradigms of professional software. It's great to be able to pick ups something like Davinci Resolve and just know what I can do and find the 10 keyboard shortcuts I want and then get to work, just because I learned Ae and Premiere a decade and a half ago.

I also share your frustration with iMovie and garageband... I can't get a damn thing done in GB and I've tried several times.

It's like the CLI: I already know exactly what I want to do, and I have an understanding of how the computer is going to deal with it. These apps feel like trying to drive a car with an iPhone app.

However, I work with a lot of non-professionals and they love these tools. So more power to them. I remember using logic back when I started 20-something years ago and had no idea baout how MIDI worked. I remember being able to actually have fun getting things done in fruity loops or rebirth. I'm glad there are tools out there which are nerf'd up for the beginners.

It's hard to go back to Duplo once you know Lego. Curse of knowledge.

I have had nothing but endless struggles trying to get iMovie to produce what I want (often extremely simple) and not a Ken Burns slideshow.

Honestly, after fighting with it for several hours, I almost always end up googling some ffmpeg incantations and get close enough to be happy.

It’s interesting how many iMovie defaults you have to un-check — Ken Burns, Stretch to Fit, Fit length to Soundtrack, e.g. — to produce what you want because the defaults were selected by people who know what they’re doing.

VLC logs its ffmpeg incantations which is handy for cribbing, extending

100% re ProTools, Logic and other DAWs that share core UX paradigms with analog tape recorders like Tascam. When GarageBand moved away from this core, I dug into Live. Amazing, powerful and complicated. “Plug in, arm track, record” is still very appealing and I sometimes miss gBand’s familiar simplicity.

I used Final Cut steadily through v7.x but still used iMovie for quick slideshows and rough edits. Final Cut X felt unrecognizable and stymieing, so I moved to Blender VSE. It’s incredibly powerful and configurable and complicated. iMovie is simple for working w mobile screencaps and I like the Storyboard concept in this new release. I’ll see where it fits in my workflows so long as I don’t completely blank the next time I’m in Blender.

I'm still salty about how they had a pro photo app, Aperture, and then killed it unceremoniously in favor of a neutered approachable equivalent.

It's hard to lose a favorite app. You might check out RAW Power¹, which has some Aperture DNA in the form of Nik Bhatt².

Last year I left Lightroom for Photos, which is surprisingly powerful when used with 3rd-party apps and extensions³.

¹https://www.gentlemencoders.com/raw-power-for-macos ²https://www.gentlemencoders.com/about/ ³https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205245

Which extensions would you recommend for Photos?

I'm using it with the Photos integration provided by RAW Power¹, Affinity Photos², and Pixelmator Pro³.

¹https://www.dpreview.com/news/0399283051/raw-power-3-availab... ²https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=page... ³https://www.pixelmator.com/tutorials/resources/a-quick-guide...

You're salty? I bought Aperture a couple of months before they killed it!

In hindsight I probably should have contacted my credit card provider, but I guess I naively thought Apple would do the right thing. No such luck.

Can we talk about how cool Aperture was that it even implemented the use of a private API that Aperture used to dim and desat the system UI elements?

I can’t remember if it was specific to Aperture only or if it went along with other Apple “pro” apps.

You’re thinking of the framework ProKit, which was used by a bunch of apple’s pro apps.

It didn’t dim and desaturate standard elements though - it was a framework offering a set of custom controls that had their own art. That art was drawn to look similar to desaturated versions of standard controls.

You know Aperture has been dead a long time when there is no one left to complain about how relatively poor its performance was, especially in its early years. There were of course some great ideas in there, especially in the UX and photo management stuff, but even on my (at the time!) awesome Dual G5 tower it was a mad resource hog. It never got anything like the love or investment Apple's other Pro apps did, with long gaps between relatively slim feature updates. I also forgot the price trajectory; v1 launched at 500 bucks, falling to just 80 by the final v3.

It was slow but it was great. Leagues beyond Lightroom at the time.

iMovie is like other Apple software in that it's great if you're on the happy path but worse than useless the moment you try to do something that Apple thinks you shouldn't.

For my basic use of stabilizing clips then putting them in sequence with transitions, DaVinci Resolve was easier and less frustrating to use (for me).

I'm not sure this is correct. Have you worked on software at Apple?

https://alex4d.com/notes/item/imovie-2013-is-consumer-ui-on-...

I wish Apple would still make Aperture.

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